Authorities asked to remove toll plaza from KKH

MANSEHRA: Political parties, Ulema, traders and transporters have demanded the federal government to end the toll tax collection on Karakoram Highway near here.

“The federal government has been receiving the toll tax at three places in the distance of hardly six kilometres and employees and students of Abbottabad and Mansehra are paying this unjustified tax several times a day,” Malik Waheed, the divisional president of Pakistan People’s Party, told a grand jirga attended by representatives of the political parties, traders, transporters and others here on Monday.

The jirga also constituted an action committee which would first meet the local lawmakers, senators and federal minister for communications, seeking their support in removing the toll tax collection plaza at Khatain-da-Galla and then give a call for protests and wheel-jam strikes.

Kamran Sheikh, a trade leader, said that Mansehra was the only district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the National Highway Authority was collecting the tax at KKH.Maulana Inayatur Rehman said that since the federal government was receiving the toll tax at Hazara Expressway in the Qalandarabad and Badra interchanges, it should remove the toll tax plaza at the Khatain-da-Galla, which falls within hardly 3km distance.

“If the government doesn’t end this toll tax plaza, the civil society, traders and transporters would remove it forcibly,” he added.Local PTI leader Basit Qayyum Swati, a former tehsil council member Mian Abrar and traders’ leader Hafiz Ijaz also addressed the jirga and demanded immediate scrapping of the toll plaza.