Fruit traders have blocked the Barisal-Dhaka highway demanding allotment of some new stalls built by Barisal City Corporation (BCC) without lottery.
The vendors put barricades in the Hatem Ali Choumatha area on the highway around 11am on Tuesday, disrupting vehicular movement and causing suffering to commuters.
The traders said they had been doing business for a long time taking a piece of land on lease from Zilla Parishad.
However, the BCC got ownership of the land after demarcating its boundary when Barishal municipality upgraded to a city corporation.
Former BCC mayor Sadik Abdullah tried to build stalls on the land earlier but was forced to stop the construction work in the face of the vendors’ protest, said one of the protesters Shahid.
But now the BCC officials erected some 30 to 35 stalls on the land and want to allot through a lottery, he alleged.
He warned that they would continue the movement until their demands are met.
