Owners of vehicles hired in Lok Sabha polls stage dharna in Mancherial

Hired vehicles owners staged a rasta-roko demanding immediately payment charges of their services during Lok Sabha polls here at IB Chowk on Friday.

Mancherial: Owners of cars and auto-rickshaws (Tata Ace), hired by officials engaged in conduct of recent Lok Sabha polls and in transporting election material, staged a rasta-roko demanding immediately payment charges of their services here at IB Chowk on Friday.

Bairi Thirupathi, an agitator, regretted that they were forced to move around the office of Mancherial RDO to get the payment for three months.

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He alleged that officials were unnecessarily making them wait even though the funds of election expenditures were released long back. They raised slogans against officials of revenue and elections departments.

Traffic came to a standstill for a while following the protest of the owners of the vehicles. Police rushed to the spot and diverted the traffic through other routes.

However, they withdrew their protest when Collector Kumar Deepak assured them of sanctioning the charges within a fortnight. He said that action would be taken against the officials if found delaying the payment.