July 30, 2008	Wednesday	Rajab 26, 1429

KARACHI, July 29: Water tanker operators have demanded of the government to bring an end to what they called excesses meted out to them by the traffic police and exorbitant filling charges being demanded by the contractors of town hydrants.

A delegation of the Karachi Water Tankers Owners’ Welfare Association met the District Coordination Officer Karachi, Javed Hanif, and apprised him of the problems being faced by the tanker operators on Tuesday.

They warned that if their demands were not met they would be forced to keep the fleet of tankers off the road. The DCO assured the delegation that he would take up the matter with the authorities concerned.

Earlier, the association in a meeting chaired by its president Haji Mohammad Younis Khan had given a 36-hour deadline to the government to curb traffic police excesses and exorbitant charges demanded by contractors.

The meeting adopted a resolution asking the government to exempt water tankers from the six-hour ban (from 8am to 11am and from 5pm to 8pm) imposed on the movement of heavy vehicular traffic by the provincial home department.

It said the ban on the tankers’ movement during this period was not only creating problems for the localities depending on tanker service for water but was also affecting their business.

An office-bearer of the association, Hazoor Bakhsh, said the meeting observed that the ban on tankers’ movement failed to provide any relief to citizens during the peak hours. Also, he said, it was being misused by traffic police for harassing and extorting money from drivers of water tankers.

The tanker operators urged the government to ask the traffic police to discourage the trend of parking vehicles on roadsides and lifting and dropping of passengers by buses, coaches and minibuses at busy intersections and in the middle of roads if at all the authorities were sincere in ensuring smooth flow of vehicular traffic during the peak hours.

Attributing the cause of exorbitant water tankers’ rates to the hike in diesel prices and the high tankers’ filling charges, the meeting accused the contractors of town municipal administrations’ hydrants of charging Rs110 and Rs120 for filling a tanker having a capacity of 1,000 gallons as against the official rate of Rs55 fixed by the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board.

Since the contractors who got the right of drawing water from the hydrants of TMAs had a limited number of tankers at their disposal, they sublet the contract to other tanker operators on more than double charges, it was observed.