The Bombay High Court asked the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to ensure that the footpaths in the city are actually walkable for pedestrians and directed it to remove encroachments by unlicensed hawkers.
A division bench of Justices Gautam Patel and Neela Gokhale directed the BMC to file an affidavit by March 1 identifying specific problems and indicating the solutions it would offer to deal with the issue.
The high court had earlier this year taken up suo motu (on its own) the issue of unauthorised hawkers and stalls on footpaths in the city.
The BMC’s counsel S U Kamdar on Monday informed the court that several such hawkers were being removed by the corporation and specific hawking zones were being established to address the issue of encroachments.
We need to ensure there are footpaths available for pedestrians, which are actually walkable. There are authorised or unauthorised structures on footpaths. The result is that because the footpath is narrow, pedestrians face difficulty, Justice Patel said.
One of the bigger problems is paver blocks. They keep on coming out and popping out and causing problems to pedestrians. We do not know what the technical difficulties are, but someone from the engineering department needs to look into this. Even senior citizens stumble despite walking with sticks. You should make the footpath accessible, the court said.