Looking for an alternative: Sunday Bazaar vendors demand re-establishment of market

Claim they were not informed that the busy bazaar will be demolished

KARACHI: The Defence Housing Authority administration should provide another space for the demolished Sunday Bazaar, allowing stallholders to reestablish the market, demanded Malik Basheer Ahmed, the president of the United Bachat Bazaar Stallholder Welfare Organisation.

Speaking at a press conference at Karachi Press Club on Monday, he appealed to the DHA administrator and the Karachi corps commander to help the 2,000 vendors who had stalls established in the market that was recently torn down in Phase VIII.

"The DHA administration demolished all the stalls in the market without warning the stallholders, leaving merchandise lying amid the rubble and destroying the livelihood of thousands of people," lamented Ahmed. "With one roll of a bulldozer, Karachi's largest Sunday Bazaar ceased to exist."

He claimed that the vendors were only told to remove their merchandise after sunset but were not warned about the demolition of the market and its stalls. "If we had been informed, we could have saved our belongings," he added.

Ahmed said that the organisation had held several meetings with the DHA administration, requesting it to allocate them another area in the locality so that they could go back to earning a living for themselves and their families, but to no avail.

As a result, he explained, the vendors plan to organise a meeting at Karachi Press Club to publicise their predicament and demand an alternative space for the Sunday Bazaar that was destroyed without taking into consideration the problems this would create for them as well as the customers who frequented the busy market.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 12^th, 2015.