To remove the dependency on pkg_resources, i did the following...
pkg_resources was needed to access the files within the .egg.
import pkg_resources
accessfiles = pkg_resources.resource_listdir(...)
Hence accessed the contents of the .egg using zipfile module...
path = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
import zipfile
z = zipfile.ZipFile(file(path.rsplit("/", 3)[0]))
accessfiles = filter(lambda zipList: zipList.startswith("<pattern>"), z.namelist())
This way dependency on pkg_resources was removed.