MCB officials, car bazaar owners spar over turf

Sukhmeet Bhasin

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, August 14

A tussle between MCB officials and car bazaar owners was reported over encroachment of the area outside their shops on the Goniana road near Mittal Mall.

Municipal Commissioner Rishipal Singh on Tuesday morning held a meeting with the car bazaar owners in which the latter were told to remove the encroachments outside their shops.

Later, around 12 pm, an MCB team headed by secretary Vishal Wadhawan and tehbazari wing, along with police force, reached the spot to clear the encroachments, which led to heated arguments between them.

The issue intensified when the MCB team started towing away vehicles parked for sale outside the car bazaar shops.

A shopkeeper showed his press card of a Delhi-based newspaper and tried to stop the MCB team from removing encroachments.

Irked over which, Vishal Wadhawan accused the press of ‘blackmailing’, which irked the mediapersons covering the anti-encroachment drive there. Later, Wadhawan clarified that he had not used the word for the entire press.

Car Bazaar Dealers Association president Manvinder Singh Bhola and former president Jaskiran Sharma alleged that for the past 18 years, they had been doing this business at that place, but now, a few showroom owners in the market didn’t want them to work here.

Vishal Wadhawan said, “We have been instructing them for the past few days against wrong parking of vehicles. However, left with no option, we had to take action.”

The action of the MCB has also exposed its pick-and-choose policy as the civic body removed encroachments from the market on the Goniana road, but did not do anything at the illegal parking of vehicles outside Mittal Mall.

The parking contractor is ‘illegally’ charging money from people parking vehicles on the road outside Mittal Mall as the road belongs to the civic body and he cannot charge money for that.

The issue has been repeatedly raised by councillors during the general house meeting, but despite this no action has been initiated in this regard.