PR officers blamed for coach copper theft

NA committee says Railways admin, lawyers assisting land grabbers.

LAHORE:

The parliamentary sub committee for Pakistan Railways (PR) land has pointed the finger at the Lahore divisional superintendent (DS) and other officers over the theft of copper from a freight coach on Wednesday.

Naseem Akhtar, the chairwoman of the Sub Committee for Land of the National Assembly Standing Committee for Pakistan Railways, also accused PR officers of aiding land grab and other acts of corruption in a briefing to reporters after the sub committee’s first meeting at Railways Headquarters.

Akhter said PR was going through its worst time ever and its administration was to blame. She said PR officers were corrupt and had little interest in improving the state-run rail service. She said recent cash injections into PR from the federal government had been used to pay officers’ salaries but she didn’t think they had earned them.

Referring to the recent copper theft, she said she found it hard to believe that the Lahore DS did not know what had happened in the incident. The freight coach was found abandoned and empty of copper at Kharian a few hours after it was stolen from a station in Lahore.

“A coach cannot move without a locomotive. It can’t be moved off the track. How can he not know?” she said. She said that the Lahore DS had told her he would submit an inquiry report of the incident to the sub committee within a week, but she had demanded that he also recover the copper.

Akhter said that a Railways Police inquiry into the theft of a stash of radiators had shown that the radiators had been stored as scrap after they were replaced with new radiators. They had then disappeared from the store, she said, suggesting that PR officials had sold them off.

She said that about 55 per cent of the PR’s 1.75 million acres of land had been illegally occupied. “I do not believe this can be done without the help of the Railways administration.,” she said.

“The lawyers hired by Railways are also assisting the land grabbers. There are many cases that have been pending in the courts for decades because of the lawyers,” she said. She added that the committee had written to bar associations asking that the membership of such lawyers be cancelled.

Akhter said PR officers needed to up their performance or be prepared for the sack. She warned that general managers would also punished if they did not take serious action against divisional superintendents involved in scandals. “The committee has an accountability role in all such issues and we will do our best,” she said.

She said the standing committee had already rejected the suggestion that the occupied land in Lahore division be declared katchi abadis. She said this would merely encourage the occupation of the PR land that hadn’t been occupied already.

APP adds: The committee also expressed concern about the auction of PR land and summoned the record of such auctions for the next hearing. Akhter said that the committee would investigate alleged irregularities in the auctions.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th, 2011.