PESHAWAR, July 25: Abdul Khaliq Farahi, the Afghan consul-general in Peshawar, has asked the Afghan interior ministry to look into illegal operation of passenger buses between Pakistan and Afghanistan via Torkham border checkpoint.
“This is a very important issue. If we do not take immediate steps, the Pakistan-Afghanistan friendship bus service may prove a failure,” the Afghan diplomat told Dawn on Monday.
“Our government will certainly take necessary steps to halt the parallel transportation system,” Mr Farahi said.
Illegal operations of passenger coaches between Peshawar and Kabul had brought the Pakistan-Afghanistan friendship service on the verge of collapse, said the Managing Director of the United Bus Service (UBS).
The service was started between Peshawar and Jalalabad on May 26 after 27 years. The UBS won the contract to ply five busses a day between Peshawar and the provincial capital of eastern Nangarhar province of Afghanistan.
But the company could run only two buses a day because, the company claimed, the service could not attract Afghan and Pakistani passengers due to an illegal parallel transportation system available at Torkham border.
The provincial transport department had asked the interior ministry to halt the illegal operation of passengers mini coaches from Torkham to Kabul, a senior official said.
It sent a letter to the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) about movement of mini coaches by Afghan transporters between the two countries without obtaining route permits from the federal ministry of communication, said Director RTA Sajid Khan Jadoon.
“We can’t do any thing. The Khyber Agency checkpoint is just half kilometre from the bus terminal at Karkhano bazaar,” Mr Jadoon told this correspondent on Monday.
“But the main international route, which is about 51 kilometres, falls in the jurisdiction of the federal ministry of interior and Governor’s Fata Secretariat,” Mr Jadoon said.
He said he had three other partners in the company who could not run their coaches since the start of the bus service despite the fact they had obtained all the legal documents from the government.