February 1, 2002	Friday	Ziqa’ad 17, 1422

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GILGIT, Jan 31: More than 200 surplus workers and over 100 trucks of the Northern Areas Transport Corporation (NATCO) will be absorbed in the National Logistic Cell (NLC), sources told Dawn on Thursday.

They said the NATCO management had taken the decision, as the corporation had been suffering losses for a couple of years due to the closure of the Chinese border and the Central Asian transit route after the Sept 11 attacks in the US and the US-led strikes against Afghanistan.

The sources said the NATCO had purchased a fleet of 100 Mercedes trucks in early 90s and had recruited more than 200 workers, anticipating a transit trade boom between Pakistan, China and CARs.

Due to the border closure, they said, the truck fleet and the workers had been rendered surplus, and there was no capacity in the NATCO to adjust them on domestic routes in the Northern Areas.

Another source said that due to non-payments of outstanding bills on government freights, intermittent closure of the Karakoram Highway and “financial haemorrhage” had caused losses to the corporation.

The sources said the NATCO had once been a profitable organization, but excessive bureaucratic meddling had brought it to its knees. The corporation, they added, had to bear expenditures of various high-level delegates.

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