Remaining without work for more than 30 days after Ranchi Municipal Corporation cancelled their licences on March 27, meat shop owners are now thinking of knocking the doors of Jharkhand High Court demanding it to intervene in the matter so that they could also make their both ends meet. Meat shop owners Association feel that even after the approval given for issuing licenses to those who fulfilled the criteria defined by the municipal body, the road might not be smooth for them to get licenses and start businesses due to lackluster attitude of the State Government in opening of centralized slaughterhouse in the State Capital.
“We had a hope till Wednesday that some way out will be found out in the Board Meeting of RMC, which was deferred several times in the last one month. Still the result is zero and therefore we are also taking legal opinion from different sources and might file a petition in the High Court very soon,” said president of Meat Shop Owner’s Association Md Firoz. Shops are closed for over a month and all the meat sellers have come into penury, he added.
“RMC says that meat shop owners will also be given temporary licenses but what would we do with it as no arrangement for slaughterhouse has been made so far by them. According to the RMC itself, the slaughterhouse being prepared will take at least two months time till then we cannot leave our children and family on roads to starve,” he said.
President of Chicken-Mutton Traders’ Association Md. Rizwan Ansari also apprehended that many of the non-vegetarians might drop the idea of buying it from them due to religious obligations if small and big animals are slaughtered at a common place.
“This is nothing but sheer discrimination. Our shops are closed, now you are saying that it will take at least two months more to get the slaughterhouse started; meat sellers will simply die in this situation,” said Ansari.
They would have first made an arrangement for the slaughterhouse, and then the dictat would have been passed, he added.
On the recent proposal of RMC to issue licenses for mini slaughter houses also to private parties, Rizwan said that it will also be quite time taking and will also be a costly affair, putting extra burden on the purchasers only.
Referring to the new guidelines for chicken and fish vendors, he was of the opinion that it will put hundreds of people on road as most of them were small parties doing their business on the road side and had no proper place for it. “The Government must think about them also as they too have a right to live in this world,” he said.
The Association also objected the sudden rise in the annual fees for the license holders. As per the new provisions, the fish merchant has to pay `500 annually while the chicken and mutton sellers will have to pay a sum of `2000 and `5000 respectively. Moreover, there is also a provision to impose fines of Rs 2000 against the person violating the set guidelines during the sale of flesh, fish or poultry.