Chandigarh, September 13: Dealers in Chandigarh’s used cars are up in arms against the administration’s move to relocate the market, which is said to be the biggest in the country.
Dealers at the market, in the city’s Sector 7 market area, Sunday did not display the cars and staged a peaceful protest against the Chandigarh administration by wearing black badges.
‘We do not know the reason why the administration wants to shift this market. We are doing our business peacefully from here for the last 30 years and now suddenly we got an order to change this market’s location,’ Ramneek Singh Pannu, general secretary of Chandigarh Car Bazaar Association, told IANS Sunday.
‘There are 43 main car dealers in this market and each dealer has five to seven sub-dealers working with him. This move of the administration will directly affect over 1,000 families. They said that they got complaints from RWAs (residents welfare associations) and some hoteliers, but one thing is strange that nobody approached us.’
This weekly car bazaar is held every Sunday on the Madhya Marg stretch in Sector 7. A few days back, the administration had directed the dealers to move their market to the industrial area or to some other open space, away from the busy sectors.
Jatinder Singh, a car dealer, told IANS: ‘We have our own permanent offices here from where we operate our entire business. It is impossible to shift our base at this point and we will certainly lose our business.’
He said every Sunday over 800 cars are displayed here, and around 100 sold. These not only include economy cars, but elite cars like Mercedes, BMW and SUVs, while the customers are from Punjab, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.
However, the officials are in no mood to budge from their stand on relocating the market.
‘We are not interfering in their business but we want to provide them better and more spacious place for their business. Moreover, we had also got several complaints against these dealers as their cars cover the whole market and other businesses are suffering due to this,’ a senior official said.
Unaware of this tussle between the car dealers and administration, scores of outstation customers were left in the lurch Sunday.
‘We had come here to buy a jeep, but on reaching here we came to know about this strike. We have wasted our whole day due to this,’ said Amit Tandon, a resident of Punjab’s Amritsar city, some 250 km from here.
—IANS