Extortion on city footpath continues unabated

Extortion continues unabated on city footpaths where hawkers and small-time traders need to pay musclemen hundreds of thousands of takas in toll every day for spaces to run their business.
Musclemen in collusion with some law enforcers allegedly run this toll collection business. Local influential political leaders are reported to have a share in the business, sources alleged.
Some hawkers said they needed to pay the musclemen on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to run their shops on the footpaths, which otherwise becomes illegal as such business obstruct pedestrians’ movement.
The Dhaka Metropolitan Police commissioner, AKM Shahidul Haque, has also admitted that such extortion is going on in the city.
The toll collectors have divided the footpaths in different blocks such as Gulistan, Karwan Bazar, New Market, Farmgate, Mirpur, Mohammadpur, Mouchak, Malibagh, Motijheel etc as their fiefdoms to carry on the toll business, the sources said.
Tolls range between Tk 25 and Tk 100 a day for hawkers at Gulistan and the amounts go higher at Karwan Bazar, according to the traders.
One Selim is reported to be collecting such tolls from vendors in the stretch between the Rupali Bank and the City Bank Limited at Belpatti in the Gulistan area. Tolls range between Tk 60 and Tk 100 a shop a day. Belpatti has 45 shops.
Selim, who runs a shop in the Ramna Bhaban market, collects the money from hawkers on a daily basis and shares a portion of it with the police, keeping a handsome amount for himself, a trader of the area said.
Toll collection at Belpatti continued even during the military-controlled caretaker administration when all the hawkers were evicted from the footpaths, said the trader.
A hawker leader, Ledu, collects toll from the traders on the footpaths stretching from Belpatti to Golap Shah Mazar where more than 200 shops are put up. Ledu collects Tk 30 to Tk 40 from a shop daily, another trader said.
A big portion of the footpath trading in the Gulistan area is controlled by one Monwar Hossain Monu, a local unit-level leader of the ruling Awami League. His domain covers the under-construction Gulistan Complex to the Sundarban Square Shopping Complex up to the Bangabazar Hawkers Market. More than 700 hawkers run their businesses on the footpaths in the area.
A local trader said that Monu had evicted more than 170 hawkers from the area after the Awami League-led alliance government had come to power in January. But he reinstated some 30 of them after taking more than Tk 20,000 to 30,000 from each at a time.
‘All the hawkers here need to pay Tk 1,000 a month to Monu,’ the trader said, adding without paying him tolls, no trader can run his business in the area.
Monu started collecting tolls after Abul Kalam Azad, who was general secretary of the Ward 56 Awami League, had survived an attempt on his life at Kakrail in March.
In the Baitul Mukarram National Mosque area, one Nuru Miah collects tolls from about 150 shops on the footpaths stretching from the mosque’s north gate to the Dainik Bangla crossing. Tolls range between Tk 40 and Tk 100 daily for a shop, one of the traders said.
In the Karwan Bazar area, sources said tolls are collected from makeshift wholesale kitchen markets, vegetable markets, fish markets and vegetable depots set up illegally on the footpaths at night. Some 700 vegetable depots are there in the area, most of which are illegal.
Extortion and other crimes declined during the regime of the caretaker government. But sources alleged as soon as the Awami League government came to power, control over the depots on the footpaths shifted while the rates and limits of extortion changed.
The Dhaka police chief, admitting that such extortion was going on, said ‘Extortion is going on in various techniques and in the names of criminals and associations and even through mutual understanding. But the traders do not lodge complaints with the police.’
‘We urge people to lodge complaints with the police without any fear so that we can take action against the offenders,’ he said.

Courtesy of NewAgebd