KARACHI, Feb 26: Transporters have threatened to give a call for a strike in protest against police excesses and lack of essential facilities for transport operators on highways.

Talking to this scribe at Banaras, representatives of various transport operators’ organisations said that they had already informed the government of their grievances and put forward their demands but no progress had been made in this regard. “If these demands are not met, we would be left with no option but to give a call for wheeljam strike,” they said.

About their grievances, they stated that police on highways would imposed heavy fines on operators of inter-city buses for the overloading of luggage on rooftops of their busses. This fine is in addition to the amount paid to them regularly. They pointed out that passengers, most of them Karachi-based, would board the buses with luggage and the bus operators had to accommodate all their belongings. However, police would not accept any argument only to extort money using the pretext of overloading. They said the bus crew would be let off upon paying the illegal gratification to the police.

The transporters also expressed their annoyance over the pressure to reduce fares, arguing that on the one hand, the government had increased the petroleum prices and, on the other, it would not allow them to raise the fares. Coupled with the heavy fines and illegal gratification, the costlier fuel had forced the transporters to increase the fares under the obvious compulsions. “If we don’t increase the fares, we would have to stop operating the inter-city buses,” they maintained.

Regarding extortion, they pointed out that there were at least 15 points between Karachi and an interior Sindh destination along the highway and every driver had to pay a fixed amount to the policeman posted at each point. None of them was an official checkpost, they added. They claimed that the deployment was meant to extort drivers.

They also complained of inadequate security along the highways linking Karachi with other cities of Sindh, Balochistan and Punjab. On these routes, robberies are order of the day and the victims are bus passengers, truckers and other private vehicles. The transport operators would not indulge in activities like lodging an FIR with the police station concerned because they could not afford spending time in the litigation and fatigues involved.

Furthermore, they said, the route between Kashmor (Sindh) and Dera Ghazi Khan (Punjab) had always remained under constant threat from highwaymen.