A tender holder collects parking fee from a bike owner near Big Bazaar in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, July 19: City police today arrested a person, who had taken a parking lot outside Forum Mart, a shopping mall, on lease, for demanding extra money from people.

Sources said the arrest of Shashank Shekhar Das followed that of two of his employees, Dhabaleswar Sahu and B. Anil Kumar Patra who were picked up last night.

All the three were arrested under section 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing property) of the Indian Penal Code and were produced in the court.

“As their bail pleas were rejected, they were sent to jail,” said a police officer. They were charging Rs 5 for parking of two-wheelers instead of Rs 2 mentioned on the tickets.

This is not the first case of charging more than stipulated amount for parking of vehicles.

Recently, a councillor of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) was harassed by the employees of a parking lot near Forum Mart in Kharavela Nagar over payment of parking fee.

Following a complaint by the councillor, the BMC authorities conducted a surprise raid on the parking lot last evening and arrested Sahu and Patra.

The police said that Das, the manager of the parking lot, is a relative of a suspended BMC employee and had taken the parking place on lease by paying Rs 8.50 lakh. He decided to raise the parking charge as he was not making ‘enough profit’.

A BMC official said that after investigating the matter, they found that the employees here had been collecting extra money for several months, but nobody had complained about it. “After the recent complaint, we conducted raids and found them guilty,” said the officer.

The lease for this parking lot is going to expire in 15 days. The people alleged that the managers of the parking lot have been harassing them everywhere.

The city has several legal and illegal parking lots. Most of the legal parking lots have been leased out to contractors.

There are 16 parking lots in the city that have been leased out by the BMC. Besides, there are also some parking lots managed by Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA).

Recently, the Kharavela Nagar police had arrested a person for running an illegal parking lot beside Forum Mart.

On May 16, the police had also arrested Chitta Ranjan Dash for killing his friend Santu Ghose in front of the Big Bazaar in full public view over the sharing of the earning from an illegal parking lot managed by them.