MULTAN, Jan 20: The sugar millers and transporters, causing a great deal of inconvenience to the private and public transport, are grossly involved in violation of the sugarcane act.

Both local and traffic police are keeping a ‘meaningful’ mum over the situation as not a single truck or a tractor-trolley overloaded with sugarcane has so far been fined during the current season in DGK police region.

In the main, vehicles are loaded three to four times beyond their capacity from sugarcane farms for their onward transportation to sugar mills. Besides the blockade of various roads, these overloaded vehicles also bring about a number of accidents.

The sugarcane from various towns and villages are being supplied to the four sugar mills, including two in Muzaffargarh district and one each at Rajanpur and Layyah. More than 400 vehicles supply the sugarcane to these mills every day besides the supplies to sugar mills in the NWFP and Bahawalpur.

To load the cane, these vehicles are parked on roads that caused traffic snarls up. With a loading capacity of 200 maunds, these trucks are overloaded with more than 600 maunds of cane. Similarly, tractor-trolleys carry a weight of sugarcane no less than 1,300 to 1,500 maunds as against the capacity of 700 maunds.

This spell of sugarcane transportation continues for about six months starting from November to April while overloading of vehicles goes unnoticed by the authorities concerned. When contacted, the DG Khan SP (Traffic) was not available in his office. — Correspondent