The pedestrian plaza on Lindsay Street. A Telegraph picture

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) is not amused at the littering and other acts of nuisance on the Lindsay Street pedestrian plaza, barely two days after its inauguration by chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

So, the civic body is going on an anti-litter drive from Monday.

At the behest of mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya, municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay has directed conservancy officers to post a special team in the pedestrian plaza to slap a spot fine of Rs 20 on an offender caught spitting or littering.

At the flagging-off of the underground car-parking plaza and the inauguration of the pedestrian zone, Bhattacharjee had urged users to keep the facilities clean.

But the cobbled walks of the pedestrian plaza are stained with gutkha and littered with disposables.

Said the mayor: “It’s high time people realised that the city is not a huge garbage bin or a big spittoon.”

“We plan to gradually extend the drive to other pockets of the city,” said the municipal commissioner.

However, as a conservancy officer pointed out, the spot-fine drive has to be sustained in order to be effective.

The CMC had launched a drive in 1999 against urinating in public. The list of offenders in the Esplanade area included college teachers, advocates, office-goers, university students and jawans on leave.

But like all popular civic initiatives, the drive was short-lived and withdrawn after a month.