Gulistan’s footpaths are as inaccessible as ever

It is the same story again. Despite the eviction drive conducted by the DSCC authorities recently, hawkers could not be removed from the capital’s busy Gulistan area. Go there, and you will see the footpaths are as crowded as ever and pedestrians hardly move through them. The whole Gulistan area remains the messiest place in the capital followed by Mirpur which has fallen on the northern part of Dhaka City Corporation. Since eviction is directly related to the livelihood of the hawkers and their families, they could not be removed. They have come back again.
These poor hawkers do not have alternatives to fall back upon for their livelihood. Once evicted from the place where they used to earn their living for years, they become helpless with no alternatives before them. Hungry stomachs do not know what is right and what is wrong. Despite knowing that it is wrong to occupy footpaths, they do it to survive.
All the plans of the DSCC evicting authorities went in vain. When last time the DSCC conducted the drive, they marked the roads and footpaths with red, yellow and green and declared that they would not allow hawkers on places marked in red. But the plan did not work. Hawkers sit with their makeshift shops on the capital’s footpaths not for free; they give a toll to the area’s ruling partly people and police for occupying the public place. And these people always remain behind the hawkers.
Dhaka city does not give a look of a capital city; it looks like a huge bazaar, thanks to the footpaths occupied by hawkers in all places around the city. These hawkers make the movement of pedestrians everywhere through the footpaths hard. They are also partly responsible for traffic jams on the roads in many places.
However, sooner or later, one day these hawkers from footpaths and roads must be cleared. If alternative bazaars are created in strategic places in the capital, things can improve. A city that is hugely overpopulated, no plan, no system can work, unless continuous migration of people from the other parts of the country can be minimised. Therefore, in order to make Dhaka a better place to live, the need of decentralising the city cannot be overemphasised. For this is necessary a strong political will which is now absent.