The other day, I was asked by a so-called ‘parking attendant’ to pay a fee for parking my car next to Singapore Plaza.
ISLAMABAD: The other day, I was asked by a so-called ‘parking attendant’ to pay a fee for parking my car next to Singapore Plaza in Rawalpindi’s Saddar area. I asked the man under whose authority he was collecting parking fees and he said that the fee was being charged by the ‘union’ of the building’s shop-owners. He also said that this was being collected since the last six weeks. Since there seemed to be no legal sanction for this I refused to pay the parking charge. I wish other motorists also did the same — i.e. refuse to part with their hard-earned money just because someone running an illegal racket asks them to.
The other issue is that why don’t local authorities do anything to stop this — or is one to assume that they, too, are part of this racket?
Faez Roger
Published in The Express Tribune, April 17th, 2011.
