Karachi Fish Harbour Authority (KFHA) has served fresh notices to boat owners to drive their abandoned boats out of the harbour's navigational channel immediately or the authority will confiscate them, officials said on Wednesday. Officials said that the authority was about to vacate the channel to provide more space for the operational boats but the boat owners requested them to extend the date of its execution plan.
"Now the authority has decided to remove the abandoned boats from the fish harbour and in this regard, the boat owners have been asked to follow the official instructions,' they said. According to official statistics, there are about 38 boats which had been parked inside the harbour navigational channel. The owners of these boats had to pay at least Rs 2.6 million to the authority as charges.
There are already dozens of idle boats standing inside the channel, the owners of which had also been sent notices to drive their vessels out of the channel so that space for active boats could be made to improve the traffic, they said. The officials said there were over 100 boats parked inside the channel and of them about 32 vessels the owners of which were unknown, adding that the authority would confiscate them if they were not driven out in the specified period of seven days and they would auction them.
Fishermen continued to demand of the KFHA to ease the congestion at the fish harbour to improve the space at the navigational channel. They said that the congestion, which the abandoned boats had created, was badly blocking their vessels movements to reach the harbour's auction hall The blockage forced the incoming vessels to remain in long-queues for hours on a daily basis. They said that such delays had resulted in the stalling of millions of rupees of catch inside the holds.
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