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Eid shopping: nobody gives a toss about the poor

  • July 19, 2021

With Eid-ul-Azha only a day away, the tempo of shopping is picking up. The crowded bazaars and shopping centers with decorations lend a festive air to the city environment.

Conspicuous among the city things that Rawalpindi city has acquired is the overabundance of newly built shopping centers, plazas, and shopping malls. These have gone to change the face of the city more than anything else does, though some people think they are now more than necessary.

This year in view of power shortages, despite some restrictions placed on the illumination of the markets, market people think it necessary. The neon blazed shop fronts and the hectic transactions inside radiate a joyous, high-spending Eid mood.

Obviously, the cattle markets and clothing shops, shoe shops, and tailoring shops are drawing the biggest crowd. Electronic shops are also crowded perhaps because prices of electronic goods are stable. Branded outfits, one would be happy to note, are losing their aura and local handloom products seem to be gaining popularity.

The officially sponsored Eid items exhibitions are proving fruitful. This is the up-market feature. What about the poor people shopping?

Eid occasion must be a great leveler or at least unifier of the classes in which case the poor must have a central place in the midst of the festivities. The answer to this question necessarily comes with qualifications, hesitancy, and negativism. In all these years of high-profile urban development, the city administration and other agencies had very little to spare for the small shopkeepers, hawkers, and roadside vendors.

They occupy pavements and in many cases even road space. Their preferred locations for business are where low-income communities live and work or in areas next to public transport transit areas and terminals. This is because the lower and lower-middle income sections of the city population are their clients and there are no formally planned areas at appropriate locations for their buying and selling requirements.

Permanent low-price shops are too few and those that exist face inexplicable hazards. The response of city officials to the problem of hawkers is to evict them. Perhaps, they do not understand the link between physical, social, and economic aspects of urban planning and its relationship to the informal sector of the hawkers.

Moti Bazaar, a favorite shopping center of low-income groups saw fire hitting it not on one occasion but three times within the space of a few years. No plan for constructing permanent hawkers markets is in sight.

If city authorities build only a few multi-storied markets in the older section of the city and the new city then it would cater to the poor people and would help partial rehabilitation of the periodically evicted roadside vendors. Of course, it all depends on how far are government policies pro-poor.

Article source: https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/866033-eid-shopping-nobody-gives-a-toss-about-the-poor

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