The commuters faced great hardships in this industrial city on Tuesday due to sudden strike of public transport. According to details the strike call was given by Public City Transport Action Committee, Punjab, against exorbitant traffic fines which had recently been enhanced by 400 percent, under the orders of Punjab government.
Commuters suffered hardships in reaching their destinations. However, the Urban Transport Buses owned by the PML-Q politicians continued operations on different routes but proved insufficient to meet the requirement of the public.
Most of the transport including buses, mini-buses, trucks, goods carriers, wagons etc did not operate on Tuesday as a protest against what transporters claim to be the intimidatory steps of Punjab traffic police.
Addressing a protest meeting, Mian Ejaz Hussain, General Secretary, Public City Transport Action Committee announced that the strike would continue till withdrawal of the Punjab Government decision. He said that the drivers of buses, wagons, trucks, rickshaws and motorcycles are suffering severely, and government is snatching their livelihood for meeting the salaries of "Political Traffic wardens", who were posted for eliminating the on-going corruption of traffic police. He alleged that government's traffic policies are resulting in negative impact over the masses and forcing the transport workers to commit suicides.
District General Secretary, expressed great concern over unprecedented increase in traffic violation fines and demanded of the government to stop this exorbitant increase of fines and revert to the previous rate of fines.
Naseer Ahmad Awan, Malik Nazir Ahmad, Muhammad Mushataq Shera, Munir Ahmad, Rana Shabbir Ahmad, Rana Rashid Javed, Muhammad Amin, Abdul Rehman Niazi, and Gull Khan also addressed the meeting and demanded the government to withdraw decision.
The protest by the transporters brought life in cities of Chak Jhumra, Chiniot, Khurrianwala, Shahkot, Jhang, Toba Tek Singh and Pir Mahal to an almost complete halt. Due to non-availability of the public transport on inter-district routes, the people faced great hardship in reaching Faisalabad and they reached their places of destination on foot.