September 26, 2007	Wednesday	Ramazan 13, 1428

ISLAMABAD, Sept 25: National Highways and Motorway Police has been allowed to recruit about 800 staff for operating weighing stations on highways and motorways, it has been learnt.

Sources said that these recruitments would enable the NH&MP to make over 40 weighing stations on national highways and motorways fully operational.

The sources in the Ministry of Communications said that NH&MP had been given additional responsibility of controlling overloading on national highways.

The conditions of Highways and Motorways were becoming bumpy due to overloading, and strict implementation of axle load law was needed and multi-axle trucks had to be encouraged to save roads, the sources said.

The sources further said that all the staff working at the weighing stations would be supervised by the motorway police. It has been learnt that Motorway Police is on top of the prime minister’s priorities to make it more performance-oriented.

The source said the government had to spend millions of rupees to repair highways and motorways every year, as roads were damaged due to overloading. He said the officials of National Highways & Motorway Police had now been authorised to check overloading so that the highways could be saved.

The vigilance staff of the Ministry of Communications in recent past had found irregularities at the weighing stations, which caused millions of rupees loss to the national exchequer.

The source said that fines to overloaded trucks were issued by the contractors manually instead of using the computerised process and no record of collection of fines was maintained.

Speaking about the over all performance of the NH&MP an official of the motorway police said when established in 1997, Motorway Police had only 367-km-long roads under its jurisdiction whereas by 2009, it would have over 3600-km-long roads to take care of.

Recounting achievements of the Motorway Police, he said traffic accidents had been reduced by 70 per cent and highway crimes by 85 per cent after the establishment of Motorway Police.

“But we are not content with the performance of the motorway police and every effort is being made to bring about further improvement in its working.