‘Unlicensed hawkers don’t have right to public land’: HC tells BMC to take action against encroachments on Bandra Hill Road
A division bench of Justices Gautam S Patel and Kamal R Khata passed an order while hearing a plea by the owners of a shop situated on the ground floor of a housing society building on Hill road.
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The bench also said that the BMC must make its “annual pilgrimage” to Hill Road and complete the exercise of removing encroachments by illegal hawkers. (Express Archives) Observing that unlicensed hawkers have no right to vend on public land, the Bombay High Court on Thursday directed the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to take action against stalls of unlicensed vendors from a public road outside a society on a Hill Road area in Bandra (West).
The bench also said that the BMC must make its “annual pilgrimage” to Hill Road and complete the exercise of removing encroachments by illegal hawkers. The court asked BMC to inform what steps are being taken to remove the unauthorised and unlicensed street vendors from the “already congested Hill Road”.
The court said that there would be “an altercation on site” and BMC must seek protection and proper assistance from Bandra Police station to carry out action. The bench also referred to its order passed on Tuesday in a suo motu plea against illegal hawking menace, where it observed that public footpaths and roads cannot be allowed to be taken over by unlicensed vendors on a permanent basis and the same was “inconceivable” as it will impact fundamental rights of pedestrians and other users of the public spaces.
A division bench of Justices Gautam S Patel and Kamal R Khata passed an order while hearing a plea by the owners of a shop situated on the ground floor of a housing society building on Hill road. Advocates Mayur Khandeparkar, Amogh Singh and Neel A Gala for the petitioners sought direction to BMC and its assistant municipal commissioner of H-West ward to remove and/or demolish the illegal encroachments of hawkers from the open space of the society compound and from the road adjoining the building.
The plea added that an increasing number of hawkers surrounded their shop obstructing ingress, against which they wrote to the BMC and police authorities. However, as authorities failed to take sufficient action, they approached the HC.
The bench noted that it did not expect to hear “mindless opposition” from the society as no action was proposed against anyone in the society and in fact the plea was for its benefit and “very probably ought to have been filed by the society in the first place”.
“Hill Road in Banda is famous for many things. One of those is the periodic removal by the BMC of precisely such persons and this is invariably followed, within no less than 48 hours, with the reemergence of these very vendors. Now the BMC must make its annual pilgrimage to Hill Road and complete this exercise,” the bench noted. The court sought compliance of its order during the next date of hearing on May 2.
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