Worli and Prabhadevi may have highest number of bogus hawkers: Civic officials

MUMBAI: The lowest number of hawker forms that were submitted for verification was from Worli and Prabhadevi.
The BMC has distributed over 1.28 lakh hawker registration forms in a 10 day long drive meant to enroll new hawkers, of which only 99,000 hawkers have submitted the forms in the ward offices for verifications.
Of which the lowest response is from areas like Worli, Byculla, Dahisar, Bhandup.
The BMC distributed 3453 forms in Worli , Prabhadevi area, of which only 2419 forms were returned, the rest weren’t returned.
Similarly in Byculla, of the 3909 forms distributed, 2595 were submitted to the BMC for verification. The BMC will now scrutinize the forms and filter the once who are eligible for a license.
Officials say that the low number of submissions show that a lot of people got registered without any documentation and were bogus hawkers
Civic officials say the number will also further decrease when the forms submitted will be filtered to see if the documents have been attached with it.BMC will take another month to scrutinize the forms, in this one month the ward offices will also be surveying the number of hawking spots that can be made available in the city, depending on the availability of the spot, and the licenses will be issued.
Municipal Commissioner Sitaram Kunte said that forms that have been submitted will be sent to the scrutiny committee, who will first prepare an eligibility criterion to select applications.
“Only those forms that will meet the eligibility rule will be approved and license will be issued only to them,”said Kunte.
There are only 15,000-odd licensed hawkers in the city, with the new hawking policy in place, the city can have upto 3.20 lakh hawkers provided the hawking pitches are made available.Another official from the License department said that those who are yet to submit the forms will have to submit with an application citing why they didn’t submit the forms before the last date. These applications will be sent to the town vending committee, which has been formed as per the directions of the Supreme Court (SC) to oversee the entire process of issuing new license. If the committee decided that these forms can be accepted as there are more spots and fewer hawkers, then the BMC will accept the forms.