By P.S. Anantharaman, IANS
Ahmedabad : Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, battling dissidence within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is facing a new threat that could dampen his poll prospects. It comes from vegetable vendors.
Ahmedabad’s vegetable and fruit vendors who have joined hands to meet the challenge posed by mushrooming big retail chains have decided to vote against Modi’s candidates in upcoming assembly elections if a solution to protect their livelihood is not worked out soon.
“We will have no option but to resort to this extreme step if the government does not protect our livelihood as many other states have done,” Ashok Punjabi, convener of the newly launched ‘Roji Bachao Samiti’ (Save Livelihood Committee), told IANS.
Their threat is not to be taken lightly. In assembly polls, a few thousand votes can tilt the scales in any constituency. According to Punjabi, the city has 80,000-100,000 petty traders and street vendors selling fruit and vegetables.
“We have also received messages from Surat and Vadodara expressing a desire to cooperate with the Samiti, in which case the numbers will swell,” he warned.
Punjabi said the committee had this month faxed messages to the chief minister’s office, seeking a meeting with Modi. “We had given a deadline of Aug 15 for a meeting with him. So far there has been no response from the government.”
Apart from a number of companies opening retail stores in Ahmedabad in recent years, US retail giant Wal-Mart has announced plans to open 50 stores here.
Punjabi said his organisation was not against big malls but insisted that the government had a duty to protect the weaker sections of society.
“What is currently happening is unequal competition. It is like slow poison. The small traders who barely manage to earn Rs.100 a day will face starvation,” he said.
The committee wants the Gujarat government to emulate the steps taken by some state governments that have prohibited malls from retailing in products costing less than Rs.100 per kg.
Such a step will go a long way in protecting the livelihoods of vegetable and fruit vendors in the city as well as the neighbourhood grocery stores to a large extent, Punjabi said.
Punjabi said Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal had prescribed such conditions for corporates running malls. The Kerala government had gone a step further and decided to enact a law to prohibit malls from entering retail business in essential commodities.