Street-food centres at Secunderabad face losses due to Covid pandemic

HYDERABAD: Street food is something that we all love. After the pandemic has taken over our lives, most of us have stopped having it and this dealt a blow to street food vendors, who put up their stalls at dusk to make our evenings better with some pipping-hot snacks. 

Apart from street food vendors, sweetmeat shops with chat counters have also been facing challenges. Once it is evening, most of us love to spend time eating chat, pakoda, Chinese street food and not to forget, sip tea from a nearby tea stall, but due to the lockdown, many stalls have been shut.

Talking to a few of the street food vendors and sweet houses in the city we found out how they have been coping up with the tough times.

As the pandemic happened the business seemed to get a little tricky, says Ashok, the owner of Balaji Sweet House in Bowenpally. 

“It will take time for all of us to cope with the situation. People are scared to have food outside and so we cannot see too many customers. Business has been reduced to half of what we used to see in pre-pandemic days.We are trying to manage it and I hope we recover from this situation soon.”

Raju, who has a tea stall in the city, sounded quite helpless as he said: “I thought we could recover from losses soon. Before the lockdown I used to make about Rs 4000 per day but now I can hardly make Rs 2,000. A lot of office staff around the place come to have my tea but now it is totally different. I find no scope in continuing but I need to feed my family and kids and so I need to do something.”

A Chinese food centre at Secunderabad named Sai Palace has been facing losses in their business. Ravi Kumar from the joint says, “We had rush hours until 10.30 in the night before. Now even if it is 9.30 pm, we cannot see many people coming to have food. We also had to cut down our staff due to the lockdown. We had about 6 staff members and now it is just three people managing the whole thing. We are waiting for our business to pick up.”