The 20-foot road in Sethuram Street, where an old structure in the KR Market was demolished over the last two days, will be widened to 60 feet at a cost of Rs 16 lakh, Mayor B S Satyanarayana said on Friday.
Work will start soon and it will four to five days to clear the debri on the demolished site. Thereafter, the road will be widened and concretised, the mayor said. “A ramp will be built from the road to the second floor of the new KR Market complex and hawkers will be accommodated in the entire stretch,” he told Deccan Herald.
But the overall cost of the market’s redevelopment has not been worked out yet. The mayor further said that he and the BBMP Commissioner, M Lakshminarayana, would inspect the place on April 28 or 29.
Meanwhile, KR Market traders said that the work on demolition of the old building was carried out twice: around 10 pm on Wednesday, and from morning till 6 pm on Thursday.
Sarojamma, a bangle trader who has since been evicted, said she had received a notice from the Palike before the demolition.
“But I have not received any compensation. The BBMP staff gave us warning to move out four days before the demolition. There were no chaos as such and the 12 vendors in the old building have been relocated to guava mandi on Bandi Mott Road behind KR Market.”
Laxman, a fruit vendor who stays close to the demolished site, said there were rice, beedi and cloth shops in the old building. “Only a handful of vendors who did business inside the old the building had licence. Most of them neither had it nor paid any to the Palike,” he said.
Some traders rubbished the mayor’s claim that the building was at least 50 years old. It was not more than 35-40 years old, one of them said on the condition of anonymity.
The KR Market police said at least 30 police personnel had been deployed on Wednesday night at the time of demolition to keep tabs on trouble-makers.