GCC to regularise street vendors, earmarks zones

As the COVID-19 cases are coming down, the Greater Chennai Corporation has decided to regularise vending zones across the city to streamline street vending.

According to Chennai Corporation data, as many as 912 streets and roads have been earmarked for street vending. “Vending zones and non-vending zones have been marked after meetings with town vending committees in all the zones. Even though the vending zones were finalised in September, it is yet to be implemented. Vending and non-vending zones will be implemented in one or two months,” an official said.

The ward engineers have been told to demarcate vending zones on the earmarked streets to allow free flow of traffic. Apart from the vending zones, as many as 4,700 streets have been marked as non-vending zones.

As per the data, the Royapuram zone has the highest number of vending streets with 122. Thiru Vi Ka Nagar, Alandur and Adyar have 112 vending zones each. Valasaravakkam zone has 103 streets as vending zones.

The city has around 23,000 street vendors who have identity cards issued by the civic body. Recently, the civic body has started an initiative to identify street vendors, who do not have identity cards and issue cards to them.

“In a rough estimate, the city has around 1 lakh street vendors. They will be brought under the purview so that they can get benefits from the State and central government,” the official added.