Lucknow, May 20: Buying a bicycle, the common man’s cheap mode of transport, has been made somewhat cumbersome in Uttar Pradesh.

Customers cannot just walk into a shop and buy the two-wheeler any more — they must show proof of identity and address, police have told cycle stores. The objective is to put a spoke in terrorism’s wheels.

The bombs used in the Jaipur blasts were planted on 10 new bicycles. Such bicycle bombs were also used in Uttar Pradesh last year — in the serial court blasts in Varanasi, Lucknow and Faizabad on November 23, and in Gorakhpur on May 22.

“Cycle buyers must show proof of identity. The shops must record the customers’ address and phone numbers on the carbon copy of their cash memos,” Varanasi senior superintendent of police Vijay Prakash said.

“It will be a bit like buying a mobile SIM card,” another police officer explained. Cycle sellers, however, say this would affect business.

“This may be very good for the administration but it’s bad for business because most of our customers come from rural areas. In villages they often have no street names or house numbers. It’s a joke to ask a poor farmer for proof of his address,” said Dinesh Mishra, a bicycle trader in Varanasi.

An official of the Uttar Pradesh Cycle Traders Association, who did not want to be identified, said: “What if the terrorists buy old bicycles from repairing shops? Or if they use rickshaws?”

Bombers have also used pressure-cooker and tiffin-box bombs, he added, so why target only bicycle shops?

On Saturday, the owner of a cycle shop in Varanasi, Badrinath Choubey, surprised customer Nitin Rai, 69, by asking him where he lived and if he had any proof of his address.

Rai, who had come to buy two bicycles for his grandsons, was not angry since Choubey was very polite.

“I feel sorry to have to ask a customer all these questions but I have no option. This is what the police have asked us to do,” Choubey said.

The police say they have no option, either. Officers said that after the November blasts, they had identified the stores from where the cycles had been bought, but the shopkeepers failed to describe the buyers well enough for their sketches to be drawn.

“Yes, there’s no law that one must show proof of identity to buy a bicycle, but the traders have a responsibility to see they sell the cycles to the right people,” a senior officer said.

Bombs were planted on bicycles also in the Malegaon blasts in September 2006. Two months ago in Assam, the police stumbled on a bicycle that Ulfa had turned into a bomb, stuffing its three metal frames with explosives and creating a mechanism to set it off.