Vending site marked on Phase IV temple parking lot in Mohali

MOHALI: The municipal corporation finds a new obstacle in implementing the Street Vendor Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vendor Act, 2014, as the vending sites it declared recently face public criticism now.
Residents took out a protest march through the streets of Phase IV (Sector 59) here on Monday against the marking of a vending zone on a paved footpath along the wall of Sanatam Dharam Mandir. The 50-odd locals led by former area councillor Gurmukh Singh Sohal raised black flags and anti-MC slogans, demanding a reversal of the marking orders.
This site in Sector 59 is one of the 14 that the MC town vending committee approved to rehabilitated the street vendors. Former councillor Sohal said: “The MC took this decision of rehabilitating the street vendors without a thorough study of the sites. This spot near the temple in Phase IV was prepared specifically as a parking site and the MC had even put interlocking paver tiles there recently to create space for vehicles. And now the MC itself is spoiling the plan, depriving people of a much needed parking space in the residential area. We demand deletion of this site from the vending spots.”
Public resentment is apparent not only in Phase IV but many other areas, where the public has found the selected sites inappropriate for street vending, as these will eat up parking space somewhere and footpaths elsewhere, which would be illegal. The MC had marked the 14 vending sites with the approval of Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (Gmada) for allotment under the Street Vendor Act and land-use policy.
The process of vendor identification started in 2015. The MC-hired private surveyor identified 2,295 vendors but the MC general house found anomalies in the company’s data and ordered a fresh study, following which in 2017, the civic body identified 973 mobile and stationary vendors.
In January 2018, the MC decided to give licences to 973 street vendors registered in the city under the 2014 Act. It also divided Mohali into four zones for reallocating the vending sites.