SWABI, May 19: The district government has banned, under section 144, shifting of machinery for repairing from the Gadon Amazai Industrial Estate (GAIE) for two months, an official informed Dawn here the other day.

The official said if anyone wanted to shift machinery for repairing after the withdrawal of section 144, he would have to go through the prescribed rules and procedures, while there was no question of permanent shifting.

In the past, he said, industrialists had devised plans for shifting their machinery to some attractive industrial zones in the country, while leaving empty buildings behind in the GAIE, he added.

The shifting of the machinery had also been criticized by the opposition in both the district and tehsil councils, he said, alleging that the district government had provided an opportunity to some influential industrialists to shift their concerns from the GAIE, where out of 450 industrial units, only 30 had been running round-the-clock, while the remaining had been closed.

The opposition councillors warned that if the district government did not stop favouring some industrialists, the Gadoon Estate would become a graveyard.

Opposition leader Jehan Zeb Khan said the industrialists had not only shifted machinery on the pretext of getting it repaired, but had also dumped it in scrape, depriving the local people of their source of livelihood in connivance with the authorities concerned. When contacted, the industrialists said the long and what they called “a flawed mechanism” for shifting the machinery to either get it repaired or replace it with new machinery had created various problems for them.