Street vendors want to run business on the capital's footpaths in a planned and legal way, and therefore, the government must recognise them by adopting a national policy in this regard, said a section of hawkers yesterday.
They also suggested dividing the capital into three categories namely red, yellow and green zones.
They will not sit in red zone comprising of diplomatic and other state-owned important sites, said the leaders of National Hawkers' Federation (NHF) at a press conference at a city auditorium.
In yellow zone, they will run business during off-peak  hours, but the green zone has to be allowed to them to use  for 24 hours a day, they said.
Although there is no official survey, estimate of several hawkers' associations say around 2.5 lakh hawkers run business on the capital's footpaths, while the number all over the country is over a million.
These vendors pay around Tk 1,000 crore to extortionists annually, but they want to pay the money to the government as revenues, said Abul Hossain, an adviser to NHF.
In the past, the government took initiative to rehabilitate hawkers, but could not make significant headway, he said.
India has recently enacted a law for street vendors, and Bangladesh needs to enact such law as well, he said.
Contacted, Khalid Ahmed, chief estate officer of Dhaka South City Corporation, said, “Prioritising only hawkers' proposal and taking revenues from them will not solve the problems of traffic jam and haphazard vehicle parking on the city roads.”  

In this regard, a meeting comprising of city corporation officials and hawker leaders will be held in the coming week, he told The Daily Star.
However, Mohammad Fashiullah, chief estate officer of Dhaka North City Corporation, said the proposal should be considered positively.
“The city corporation has its own plan to solve the problem of footpaths and traffic jam. But you cannot oust vendors from footpaths overnight as they are contributing to the nation's development as well,” he said.