LPG, water vendors, meat shop owners allege cops target them

NEW DELHI: Nimesh Kumar, tore out a page from a notebook he borrowed from his neighbour Thursday morning and frantically jotted down the apartment numbers, shouted out by a group of people wearing surgical masks who stood facing his small makeshift kiosk in south Delhi’s Khirki village.

“There are too many orders and it is difficult to deliver them all within a short interval. The police do not think twice before swinging their lathis at us when they spot us on the streets,” said Kumar, who works with a shop that delivers 20-litre drinking water jars in the neighbourhood.

Earlier this week, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the Union home ministry had issued an order elaborating on a list of exemptions categorised as essentials.

The list clearly states that piped water supply won’t be affected by the lockdown but does not explicitly mention bottled drinking water, a commodity that 14% households in Delhi depend on, according to data shared in 2019 by the National Statistical Office (NSO).

Several bottled water dealers pointed out how the lack of clarity make them and their delivery persons susceptible to police crackdown.

“We are in a mess. We have two challenges. One, delivery is a major issue. Two, we don’t see supply, which means a major crisis awaits us,” said Ankit Naagar, another packaged water dealer in Chirag Dilli.

The same is the plight of cooking gas dealers.

By 8am Thursday, a long queue had formed outside Rajan Pal’s shop in south Delhi’s Gupta Colony. The people carried portable 4kg cooking gas cylinders that needed an immediate refill.

“The government says milk booths, vegetable kiosks and grocery shops will be open. Even if I avail of these essentials today, without cooking gas, how do I cook any of it?” said Manoj Parashar, a postgraduate student who migrated from Madhya Pradesh.

This is an industry that runs more or less in an unauthorised manner in Delhi, given that getting a 14.2kg cylinder from authorised dealers would require a proper address and ID proofs. In the absence of such documents, the large migrant population in Delhi — about 6.3 million, according to the 2011 Census —depend on the smaller cylinders that have to be refilled every few days.

The government order failed to take into consideration shops that refill smaller cylinders. Meat shop owners were the other group that complained of police high-handedness, despite their enterprises also being listed in the government’s list of essentials.