Unit-1 Market — the capital’s largest wholesale and retail haat, the place the city still calls 1 Number Haat — woke on Friday to the grind of earthmovers.
After years of crowding, illegal extensions and fire after fire, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation finally cleared the main vending zone. Fifty-four shops came down. Police held the perimeter. Traders say what the flames did not finish in January, the bulldozer finished this morning.
BMC Additional Commissioner Kailash Chandra Das framed the operation as a safety measure, not a sudden raid. Congested roadside stalls and unauthorised constructions on the footpath, he said, had repeatedly blocked fire tenders and rescue teams. The civic body wanted a wider carriageway and room for fire-fighting equipment.
Deputy Commissioner (Markets) Ajay Mohanty added that the affected traders had already been allotted new kiosks and told, on allotment day, to shift. They stayed put. On Thursday evening BMC announced the demolition over loudspeakers and asked vendors to pull their goods. They did not. On Friday morning the machines moved in as planned.
The joint force was large: BMC, BDA, Commissionerate Police, reserve police and special teams from Capital, Kharavel Nagar, Sahid Nagar, Mahila Police, Laxmisagar and Mancheswar stations. Officials say the intent is simple — keep the cleared stretch empty so it is not reoccupied by nightfall.
That is the administration’s story. On the ground it was uglier.
Tempers rose as soon as the first stall went. Arguments between traders and BMC staff turned into a scuffle with police. Some vendors were taken away. Officers used a lathi charge to restore order. Heavy deployment stayed on to stop the situation from sliding further.
The January 19–20 fire still hangs over every conversation. That night blaze tore through the market’s front rows and vending kiosks. Counts varied — more than 40 shops in some reports, 97 including kiosks in others — and losses ran from over a crore to several crores. Plastic sheets, packed goods and LPG cylinders fed the flames; fire engines struggled for space. A smaller fire in August gutted two more shops. October 2025 had already taken about 30. Unit-1 has looked, for two years, like a warehouse waiting for a spark.
Traders do not deny the danger. They deny the timing and the method.
“The fire left us helpless. This eviction broke our backbone,” one group of affected shopkeepers said. A former president of the 1 Number Haat association said festival season — Ganesh Puja is days away — was the worst moment to strike. BMC announced demolition at night, he alleged, and rolled in bulldozers before people had opened their eyes. Goods worth lakhs were crushed or scattered. Many of the same stalls had already burned in January. Loans taken to restock are now sitting under rubble.
All Odisha Roadside Vendors Association (AORVA) president Pratap Sahu went further. Safety, he said, is the pretext; the real blow is to the stomach. Youth trying to start a stall in a city with few jobs, money borrowed under schemes such as PM SVANidhi, stock bought on credit — all of it, he argued, is being treated as encroachment.
The union claims more than 32,000 street vendors under its banner and has threatened a citywide shutdown plus a surprise gherao of Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi’s residence, Housing and Urban Development Minister Krushna Chandra Mahapatra’s house, and the BMC and BDA offices. Compensation, it asked, for goods destroyed on Friday and for earlier “no-notice” drives in KIIT, Prashanti Vihar, Nayapalli, Sahid Nagar, Shriya Square, Kalpana and Chandrasekharpur.
The legal charge is sharper still. The union says the drives ignore the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, and Articles 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution. Vendors, it notes, buy directly from farmers and small producers and keep prices low for ordinary buyers — the same people who filled Unit-1 through the pandemic. If the Centre can lend to street vendors, the union asks, why does a BJP-led state government keep sending the bulldozer?
BMC’s answer is that allotment already happened, notice was given, and a market that burns every few months cannot be left as a tinderbox. Officials also say they will watch the cleared land so it is not seized again.
The unfinished business is the redevelopment everyone has been promised. About 132 vendors are counted as hit by this round. The vegetable godown has still not moved to Bhagabanpur. The “Revamp” of 1 Number Haat — a cleaner, wider, fire-ready heritage market — remains a slogan. Traders now put the question bluntly: was Friday about upgrading the haat, or about pushing the poorest stall-holders off the map?
Until that answer arrives in concrete, not in press notes, Unit-1 will stay what it has been all year: a market that feeds the city, and a market that keeps catching fire.
