LAHORE, Oct 26: The Punjab Wagon Owners Association has criticised the 'unjustified' replacement of wagons with franchised buses and threatened to start protest demonstrations against the practice.

Association Chairman Maulvi Abdul Rashid Lahoolohan made the announcement at a meeting of wagon owners here on Tuesday.

He said wagon owners were being deprived of their livelihood by replacing their vehicles with franchised buses on various routes in the provincial metropolis in gross violation of the free route permit policy under which anyone owning a public transport vehicle could get a permit for plying it on the chosen route.

He said the franchised scheme was also being used to deprive the travelling public of efficient transport facilities by imposing a ban on operation of wagons on different routes without replacing the same with the prescribed number of buses. Wagons had been withdrawn completely from many routes where the franchised transport companies had not started plying one bus for every replaced wagon till date.

He said the people had also been deprived of the late night transport facility provided by the wagons on the franchised routes as the buses started operating late in the morning and stopped plying by 10pm. Commuters had to wait for the arrival of the buses under the open sky as no bus operator had bothered to build any shelter for them so far.

He alleged that the franchised policy was being misused by replacing a larger number of wagons with smaller number of buses in violation of the replacement formula and allocating routes to companies which neither owned the required number of buses nor had the route permits. The replacement of 350 wagons on Railway Station to the Judicial Colony route with only 20 franchised buses was the latest example of the 'raw deal' being given by the transport authorities to the travelling public and the wagon owners.

He appealed to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to take notice of the injustice being done to the public and wagon owners under the garb of franchised transport policy to benefit the influential bus owners and allow the wagons to continue plying along with the buses.