For close to 12 hours, the truck driven by Mohammad Areef was parked at the service road near the Thondapaly toll booth. According to the police, he had initially parked the truck near Thondapaly village on Tuesday, but he was asked to move by the police on Wednesday morning. He ended up parking the vehicle near a compound next to the service road near the toll booth - the same one where Areef and his three accomplices would allegedly plot, and commit the shocking gangrape and murder of a veterinary doctor heading back home later.
The brutal crime against Madhuri* is not just reflective of how scary the world can be for women everywhere, but also of systemic and infrastructural failure at many levels. For instance, Areef and the others accused of Madhuri’s rape and murder parking their vehicle on the service road near the toll booth was an illegal act. All along the Bengaluru-Hyderabad Highway leading up to Shadnagar, there are no designated parking lots or restrooms for truck drivers.
“There are just two traffic policemen to cover the 15 km stretch near where the woman was murdered,” says G Narayana Reddy, Inspector, RGIA Airport Traffic Police station. “There are no truck bays for legal parking. If we tell the drivers to take their vehicle away, they go park at some other place, illegally again.”
Not enough truck bays on the highway
Once Areef and his companions parked their vehicle near Thondapaly toll plaza, beside Gachibowli ORR, they were consuming liquor in a nearby compound when they noticed the veterinarian, Madhuri, park her two-wheeler near their lorry around 6 pm. After they allegedly murdered her, they left Madhuri’s charred remains 25 km away from the compound, where her body was found the next morning. The toll booth was only 3.5 km away from her residence at Shamshabad.
Had the accused been resting at a designated truck bay, and if there had been a proper, well-lit parking spot for those with private vehicles like Madhuri, the opportunity for the crime would have perhaps been reduced.
“This could have been avoided had the truck drivers been drinking in an area designated to them. There are not enough truck bays and restrooms for them along the highway,” says Bhaskar Reddy Nakula, President, Telangana Lorry Drivers Association.
“It’s a 153-km-long ring road and at none of the toll booths are there spaces allocated for truck drivers to park their vehicles. The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA) should provide designated areas where 200-300 trucks can be parked. Even the land that gets allocated gets taken over by the government for other projects,” says Bhaskar.
According to government regulations, “truck lay-byes” should “be located near check barriers, interstate borders, places of conventional stops of the truck operators, etc.”
Bhaskar has been writing to the HMDA, the state Road Transport Authority (RTA), and to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways to provide more truck bays for drivers. But there never was any response, he says.
No streetlights, public transport
All along the 25-km stretch between where Madhuri was murdered and where she was burnt, there are no streetlamps. The highway is in the dark at night and only lit by car headlights.
Harthosh Singh, a resident of Shadnagar and one of the people who protested before the police station on Saturday demanding speedy justice for Madhuri, points out how the lack of public transport makes it unsafe for women to commute on the stretch.
“If women don’t have their own conveyance, the highway becomes quite unsafe. There is a bus stop just 500 metres from where the woman was murdered. But after 6 pm, there are not many buses and no share autos also. At night it is difficult to find public transport along the highway,” he says.