The municipality is supposed to organise a round the clock affair looking at garbage collection at the break of dawn, providing citizens documentation through the day, carrying out maintenance of roads, drains, nullahs through the morning and evenings and attending to illegalities in the markets and encroachment 24 by 7. But the Margao Municipality, since inception is busy napping and has no will to help anyone especially the inconvenienced citizen.
Jaryd Rodrigues, a Margao resident who jogs through the city in the evening points out to us how the city’s sidewalks especially in the evening are crowded with vendors selling clothes, shoes, sickles and blades and hoard the sidewalks around the municipality, besides the municipality and the adjoining sidewalk near the Grace Church. Even worse is that all this is around the glorious municipal building and the city father’s do nothing about it.
“I have written a letter and sent a notice to all these vendors. Now it’s the Chief officer, Tavde who needs to do something. Nothing is in my hands,” says the Margao Municipality Chairperson Arthur D’Silva who waits to wash his hands clean of anything not done in the MMC. Arthur also throws in another flipper by telling us that the women municipal workers have been the most efficient in arresting illegal vendors and hawkers during working hours but cannot be kept overtime since they are women. Arthur also points out that the men municipal workers are corrupt and collude with these illegal vendors.
But Y B Tavde, Chief Officer at the MMC with additional charge as Deputy Collector asserts that these vendors come out at 6pm onward and stay out with their wares till 9pm and 10pm and this is beyond municipal working hours, hence it is difficult to round them up or clear them of the pavements.
Sadly these vendors block the pavements when the pavements are most required to ease the commute. The Market Inspector speaking to Herald has more excuses to cough up telling us that the market inspection teams have no arrangement to work in the evening and can function only on overtime allowances but since they’re not given, they’re unavailable in the evening to fight this mess.
The illegal vendors mess up the entire area with plastic and litter but justify their action asserting that they pay sopo tax and that too double tax since it’s late evening.
“The sopo tax agent collects the tax from these vendors but doesn’t declare this as tax collected and siphons the money to his personal hafta collections, hence it’s a revenue loss to the municipality. And then we are harassed. We come out in the evenings on the night market concept and since we pay tax and have buyers for our goods we come at that hour. If the space we utilize is unfeasible then the onus is on the municipality to find us a spot to sell our goods,” explains Harpal Yadav, a UP resident who sells kids wear on the pavement.
