CHINIOT: The Police Lines area has become a graveyard of hundreds of unclaimed vehicles. The government could have earned a handsome revenue by auctioning these rusting and damaging vehicles.

Around 400 vehicles -- cars, motorcycles and rickshaws -- have been rusting for a decade in the police lines.

Chiniot was upgraded to the district in 2009 and police line was established temporarily in a sports complex on Chiniot-Pindi Bhattian highway.

Like other districts, the unclaimed vehicles from various police stations were shifted here in the corner of the ground. The unclaimed vehicles are those abandoned by their at various places and later shifted here by the police.

The vehicles also included those recovered from thieves, but their owners could not be traced. For the last 12 years, such vehicles have been accumulated.

These vehicles are damaged totally or partially due to weather conditions. Almost all the vehicle tyres have been damaged.

Despite security at the police lines, vehicles’ parts have been stolen or removed from these vehicles.

An official said if these unclaimed vehicles had been auctioned, the government would have earned millions from them.

A couple of years back, then district police officer Syed Hasnain Haider initiated a committee for the auction of these vehicles which consisted of representatives from the judiciary, deputy commissioner office, district accounts office and the DPO office. When the matter was taken up in the meeting of the committee, the representative from the judiciary, a senior civil judge, said that the vehicles should undergo a forensic check up to ascertain whether their chassis and engine numbers were tampered with or used in any criminal activity. The police took responsibility for forensic work, but could not complete it despite the passage of two years.

District bar secretary Chaudhry Badar Munir said the government should not only auction these vehicles on time to generate handsome revenue but also remove this junkyard which may spread dengue as their broken trees were breeding grounds of mosquitoes.

A spokesperson for the district police said a committee had been constituted a couple of years ago that decided to get vehicles’ checkups from the Punjab Forensic Science Laboratory of Lahore.

“We are dispatching the vehicles to the lab in a batch of 30 vehicles. Once this activity is completed, the auction process will begin,” he added.

Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2021