This story is from January 5, 2017

Toll operators beaten, held captive over waiting in the queue

Toll operators beaten, held captive over waiting in the queue
(Representative Image)
GURUGRAM: It appears that being a toll booth employee at Kherki Daula in only a daredevils job. Once again, the irate commuters took out their anger on the toll booth employees. During an hour-long drama, the toll employees were assaulted and held captive by around fifty men. The miscreants not only damaged the property worth lakhs of rupees, but even the toll plaza was turned free during this time leading to further losses.
Incidentally, the whole drama took place in the presence of a single cop, while till a day ago, at least 25 cops were posted at the toll at a time.
The Kherki Daula toll plaza had their first run into the terror after de-monetization on the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday. The problem started at around 11:45pm when a car in the lane number 8 gave out Rs 2,000 note for the toll fee. The note was big and it took a couple of minutes for the fee collector to take out the change. Meanwhile, the third car in the queue - a white Swift Dzire (HR55 W 4316), owned by a transporter Ravinder Singh, refused to wait for its turn and kept honking and shouting. The car had a free toll tag as it belong to the local village, and therefore its driver Rahul (27) and his friend Sunder Singh, who were both drunk at that time, found it below them to wait for their turn. As they grew impatient and agitated, Sukhbir, a lane attendant tried to calm them down. But instead, Singh, who is in his 50s, got off the car and went to the toll booth. He threatened to kill the toll employees and hurled abuses at them following which an argument broke out between the man and toll collector and Singh fell on the ground. At this, Singh flashed a gun and to avoid any untoward incident, the toll employees let the car go.
But now the men were no longer in the rush. They parked their car nearby and made a phone call. Following this, around 10 cars loaded with men arrived at around midnight and at first the toll staff tried to calm them down.
"They asked the toll plaza manager Satish Chandra to hand over the man who made their friends wait in the queue. Chandra tried to protect lane attendant Sukhbir and asked them to calm down and offered them tea, water and refreshments. Meanwhile, they hurled abuses and threatened to kill everyone if that person was not handed over to them," said TC Rao, managing director, Skylark Group.
But goons refused to calm down and after waiting for 15 minutes, they began the night of horror. Around 40 to 50 men took over the toll plaza and began damaging the property and broke the boom barriers, sensors, toll booths and highway vehicles.
The goons then made all toll fee collectors come out of their booths and started beating them. When some of them tried to run towards the toll office with the collected cash, then the rioters got hold of two of them and beat them up and snatched their cash bags carrying Rs 18,130.

They then barged into the building which is on the Jaipur-Delhi side of the highway and has offices of concessionaire - Millennium City Expressways Pvt Ltd (MCEPL) and contractor Skylark Group, and held all employees captive there for almost an hour i.e. around till 1:30am. The goons continued to beat up the staff and damaging the property. During this, two of the toll employees including cashier Sandeep jumped off the first floor in a bid to run away but in turn injured themselves gravely after the fall and even suffered fractures in their legs. While two another employees- plaza manager L R Yadav and assistant plaza manager Ravindra Singh received serious injuries in the assault. Singh was thrown on the floor and was kicked and punched leading to serious internal injuries.
"The goons damaged the IT department, control room, cashier’s office and validation room too inside the office building. They damaged some really advanced technical machinery too and so far we have calculated damages of Rs 5.25 lakhs. This is besides the loss of toll fee," said S Raghuraman, CEO, MCEPL
An entire incident has been recorded in the CCTV cameras and a cop too was present when the whole drama took place. Notably, at least 25 cops were present at the toll plaza in each shift ever since the toll fee was resumed on December 2 after demonetisation. But since nothing major happened, the cops were called back from Wednesday and only cop was stationed when the goons arrived. Though CCTV footage show constable Amit Kumar trying to stop the assaulters from beating, but nobody paid heed to his words. The situation was only controlled when two PCRs from Kherki Daula police station reached the toll plaza at around 1:10am, i.e. 20 minutes after getting a call. The accused ran off after seeing the police and cops rushed the victims to the hospital.
More than a dozen victims to the Civil Hospital in Gurgaon, out of which two have been admitted with serious injuries including assistant plaza manager Ravinder Singh and lane attendant Ravi.
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