Meat shop owners threaten to gherao Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC), move High Court

GUWAHATI: The Greater Guwahati Qureshi Meat Association (GGQMA) has threatened the GMC (Guwahati Municipal Corporation) of gheraoing its office and dragging it to the Gauhati High Court if its (association's) demands are not met.

Talking to the media in Guwahati on Sunday, GGQMA general secretary Makbul Ahmed said: "The GMC continues to give us a raw deal. Following a directive from the Gauhati High Court for ensuring hygienic meat, the civic body made NEC Food Processing Pvt Ltd (NECFPPL) to slaughter goats and supply us meat for sale. The GMC, NECFPPL and GGQMA did sign an agreement in this regard.

However, after supplying us quality meat for a few days, NECFPPL started to supply us poor quality meat, literally spelling doom for our business."

Ahmed said: "This led us to stop buying meat from NECFPPL. This led GMC to stop short of renewing the licenses of some 156 meat shops doing business with license. Then the three parties – GMC, NECFPPL and GGCFMA – met together. The GMC set a condition that we have to provide goat to NECFPPL a day before its slaughtering and pay Rs 125 as slaughtering charge per goat.

This is not fair. Since we're to provide NECFPPL goats a day before slaughtering in our absence, how can we take it for granted that it has slaughtered the very goats we've given? This is not all. Rs 125 slaughtering charge per goat is too high a rate. While Tangra Slaughter House in Kolkata charges Rs 40 per goat for slaughtering, a slaughter house at Tezpur charges Rs 50 for slaughtering more than one goat. We've downed our shutters since October 15, 2018 in protest. We had to open our shops just for three days during the Durga Puja and resume our strike from October 21."

Spelling out the demands of the association, Ahmed said: "The GMC should set up three slaughter houses in the city, one each at Six Mile, Ulubari and Jalukbari and man them with its own employees. If the civic body doesn't accept our demands by Wednesday, we're going to gherao the GMC office. If our problem is not sorted out immediately, we're ready to move the Gauhati High Court against the civic body."