look news india
There is intense anger among the general public, local businessmen and social workers regarding the working style of the contracted towing squads of the Municipal Corporation in the streets and residential colonies of the capital Lucknow. Complaints are continuously coming in from different areas of the city that people’s two-wheelers and four-wheelers are being forcibly lifted with cranes from places where there is neither any ‘No Parking’ board installed by the traffic police nor any warning line drawn by the Municipal Corporation. Local residents allege that in connivance with the Municipal Corporation and the contractors, vehicles are being towed without clear rules just to meet the target of revenue collection, due to which the common citizens going out for daily work are facing immense mental and financial torture.
The trend of towing vehicles without any prior notice or symbolic boards is increasing on the main roads of Lucknow’s major markets, bank branches and residential colonies. According to the rules, before declaring any route as ‘No Parking Zone’, it is mandatory to have clear warning board, zebra crossing or yellow line marking at sufficient distance. In contrast, vehicles parked on approach roads in busy areas like Hazratganj, Gomti Nagar, Alambagh and Chowk are towed away by towing van staff within seconds. Many times, despite the vehicle owner being present at the spot and offering to pay the fine, the crane workers misbehave and take the vehicle directly to the Municipal Corporation yard, where arbitrary compounding fees are charged.
Local citizens say that the priority of the towing teams is to target the vehicles parked in narrow streets and residential pockets instead of unblocking the main intersections of the city. When customers arrive outside ICICI Bank branches and other financial institutions to transact for a few minutes, their vehicles are immediately towed away, while no authorized parking arrangements have been made by the bank management for the customers. Contractors’ employees find safe and easy targets by picking up vehicles from the streets, as there is no organized group to protest. Due to this selective strictness, the common working class and small buyers are the most troubled.
On one hand, the vehicles of common citizens parked on normal roads are being immediately tightened, while on the other hand, questions are being raised about the administrative silence on the heavy traffic jams around the big corporate hospitals and huge business centers of the city. The main carriageway remains blocked for hours due to long queues of ambulances and attendants vehicles around big health institutions like Medanta Hospital at Shaheed Path and Chandan Hospital at Gomti Nagar Extension. The public alleges that despite the blatant violation of parking rules by influential institutions and big establishments, the Municipal Corporation administration avoids taking strict action there. This dual attitude raises serious questions on the impartiality of the administration.
Crane services contracted by the Municipal Corporation have often been accused of adopting unethical methods of recovery. The salary or commission of contract workers reportedly depends on the number of vehicles they tow to the yard in a day. In this competition, while pulling the vehicles, they do not even care whether the vehicle is getting any mechanical damage or not. In many cases, complaints of breakage of clutch plate, bumper and handbrake have also been lodged. Even after paying a fine of Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,500 for no fault of theirs, citizens still have to spend extra money on repairing their damaged vehicles.
Experts related to road safety and civil rights believe that the objective of traffic management should be to teach discipline to the public and ensure smooth transportation, and not to convert it into a profit-making business scheme. The public demands that:
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Under no circumstances should vehicles be towed from places where no-parking boards are posted.
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Before picking up the vehicle, it should be made mandatory to announce the vehicle number at least twice through loudspeaker.
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Every large commercial complex, bank and private hospital should be mandated to operate adequate basement parking in their premises.
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For transparency in the towing process, it should be mandatory for crane personnel to have body-worn cameras and GPS tracking to prevent arbitrariness.
At present the situation is such that when an aggrieved citizen comes to complain, the Municipal Corporation officials declare that it is the jurisdiction of the traffic police, and the traffic police shirks it off by saying that it is a personal arrangement of the Municipal Corporation contractors. Contractors are taking direct advantage of this lack of administrative coordination. Conscious citizens and business organizations of Lucknow have warned that if the Municipal Commissioner and concerned higher officials do not immediately stop this arbitrary towing syndicate and do not stop the game of harassing selected citizens instead of illegal parking spaces, then they will take to the streets and hold massive protests.