Traders’ rehab on cards, Lansdowne Mkt revamp may take off
Times of India | 14 May 2025
12 Kolkata: The modernisation of Lansdowne Market, which has been stuck for nearly two decades, may finally see the light of the day with the KMC preparing to offer rehabilitation to a section of traders and proceed with the redevelopment.A KMC team, comprising MMiCs Amiruddin (Bobby), Debasish Kumar and Sandipan Bakshi, on Tuesday afternoon met the traders at the civic headquarters and chalked out a rehabilitation plan. The civic market department will have to shift 131 traders to start the construction work but nine of the shop owners had refused to move out without a concrete rehabilitation offer. The Tuesday meeting focused a lot on the shifting, including of the nine traders in question, whose consent had become crucial to the project, said an official. A team from the KMC headquarters will visit Lansdowne Market on Wednesday for a survey. An official said the civic body aimed at starting the redevelopment project in the next two-three months. The developer has been given 18 months to finish building a portion of the new project, where traders can be shifted. KMC has signed apublic-private partnershipdeal with a firm for the redevelopment of Lansdowne Market. The new market will come up in an eight-storey building, to be constructed on a 2.5-bigha plot. Three-hundred and fifty stall owners will be lodged the first two floors and the rest of the space will be leased out to traders to set up stalls. "The redevelopment will be taken up in phases. In the first phase, the developer will accommodate the existing stall owners.Then the PPP partner will complete the rest of the building," said a market official. He added that the new project would be similar to Lake Mall, another PPP project of the civic body.