LAHORE    -   If you are driving an old car, you need to visit Asia’s biggest auto parts mar­ket at least once a year.

The market is located close to the shrine of Hazrat Ali Hajveri. Traders in this market do their business sitting in congested streets with junk worth millions of rupees sorted around them in stacks. Bilal Gunj in Lahore can be described as the graveyard of vehicles where you can see the basic equipment of the vehicles like con­necting rods, electric wires and axles respectively and other parts of the used cars hanging up in the shops in large numbers. It is an amazing place, and anybody having a good knowl­edge of automobiles can make a new car from the parts available in this market. Car manufacturers usually stop making spare parts after 10 years of their first edition being introduced in the market. So, the spare parts of a vehicle older than ten years are not easily available in the market. But the auto parts as old as 30 years are avail­able in Bilal Gunj.

The prices of spare parts used in old cars are comparatively higher than the not-so-old ones. “I own an old Honda Civic car and have come to this market to buy an engine. I searched the entire market and found one imported from Japan. I was shocked to hear the price at Rs125,000. The trader claimed it was the only one in the entire market. Go, search for it, and come back to tell me if you find it anywhere, he sound­ed confident,” said Ghulam Abbas who visited the market last Saturday.

This scribe talked to several trad­ers about the prices of spare parts and almost everyone fed me the same line about their stuff: “Look! this is black gold you won’t find any­where else. I have this single piece left in the whole market. I have been keeping it for years.” Once notorious for selling stolen parts, Bilal Gunj market has all the necessary parts used in all types of vehicles running on the roads. Almost all the auto-parts available in the markets are imported from foreign countries, es­pecially from Japan, Singapore, Aus­tralia and Malaysia.

Recent inflation, the rising value of the dollar and the skyrocketing prices of gasoline has undoubtedly affected business in this popular auto parts market. “In the current situation, business is almost non-existent at the moment,” said Amir Butt, a busi­ness owner in the Bilal Gunj market. Throughout the day, very few custom­ers come to buy goods and parts. The main reason for this is the increasing value of the dollar, due to which the prices of imported spare parts have surged tremendously, he added.

Commenting on the high prices of spare parts sold in the market, Butt said: “We have to import spare parts of all types of vehicles from abroad and most of them from Japan. Imports cost a lot of money and it has become very difficult to do business in Paki­stan. We have to spend a lot of money in terms of labour, fees, duties and tax­es. In such a situation how can we pro­vide cheap engines and spare parts to people from our pocket”, he grumbled.

Another shop owner M Khalid said: “All the companies manufactur­ing vehicles by installing units here in Pakistan don’t prepare the spare parts of the vehicles they are selling. That is why whenever any part of a car is damaged or there is an accident, customers turn to the market of Bilal Gunj.” Bilal Ganj car market president Ch Rehan Iqbal said that due to ban on imports, the traders in this market are facing problems. “When we place an order through banks in dollars the banks play delaying tactics in giving us the dollars”, he said.

He demanded the government to solve this problem. “Tax duties should go as we have to pay tax on every sin­gle item we purchase from Japan and other countries.”