Itanagar: APTTA concerned about passengers safety
APTTA today assured of undertaking reformations within the association to ensure greater safety for the passengers across the state.
Itanagar
The Arunachal Pradesh Tour & Travels Association (APTTA) today assured of undertaking reformations within the association to ensure greater safety for the passengers across the state.
The organisation came down after several criticism following the harassment and threatening incident against three female passengers on August 11 by a Toyota Innova driver Nilu Singh. The driver, who was driving the trio to the Guwahati Airport, allegedly threatened to rape and murder them over an altercation during the trip from Itanagar to Guwahati to drop them.
Addressing a press conference at the Arunachal Press Club here today, APTTA president Toko Tadap while expressing their regret over the incident asserted their support for the victims and demanded the police to take strict actions against the accused. The association also assured that they will implement a robust mechanism within the association to ensure better safety for their passengers.
Tadap informed that they will ensure that all the relevant up-to-date documents of the commercial vehicles in service, along with the documents, including the police verification, of the respective drivers of tour operators, is properly collected and will be maintained. A copy of the same would also be provided to the respective superintendent of police. Further, records of every driver and cab service will also be maintained on a day-to-day basis, he added.
However, lamenting that their efforts will go in vain if there is lack of support from the district administration and also the passengers, Tadap said that they all need to cooperate with each other for ensuring the safety of the passengers.
Pointing out that there are a huge number of private vehicles which is operating in the state as commercial vehicles, the APTTA president agreed this one of the main reasons due to which such incidents occurs. He informed that the association will seek initiative from the district administration to ban all such vehicles and that they too will not allow any vehicle or driver which is not registered with them to ply.
For further safety measures, the president appealed to the passengers to get proper tickets for their trip from authorized counters instead of making a booking over the phone with private vehicle operators. He stated that getting a ticket from authorized agencies highly minimized the chances of such incidents taking place.
Tadap further informed that besides requesting the district administration to ban all private vehicles operating, they will also seek distinct logo for genuine operators and vehicles so that passengers can easily identify genuine tour and travel services cab.
Meanwhile, the Sahara Tour and Travels manager Bipul Kumar, while acknowledging their fault in the incident and apologise to the general people by which some of them have might hurt by the incident, has assured that such incident won’t happen again. He also expressed the agency’s gratitude to the victims for their cooperation and also lauded the police department for arresting the accused in a time-bound manner.
He further informed that the agency will initiate help desk for the passengers and GPS monitoring system for their vehicle, besides other initiatives to avoid such incidents in future.
Other members of the organisation which include General Secretary Tarh Tang and also address the media and said that we have started awareness and discussion periodically so that upto date information are being shared by the tour operators with their cab drivers and informed about the guidelines frames from time to time for the benefit of customer and cab owners.
