Hyderabad: As the Telangana government started collecting entry tax from vehicles coming from Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday, the state High Court issued an interim order exempting some private bus operators from paying the tax until Tuesday.

The Private Travels Association moved a lunch motion before the High Court challenging the Telangana order, imposing the Motor Vehicles Entry Tax on private buses and trucks, on the grounds that the unilateral action was causing them a lot of hardship.

The 71 members of the association argued that Telangana’s government could not impose entry tax on vehicles coming from Andhra Pradesh as Hyderabad was a common capital of the two states for the next ten years.

They said that the imposition of entry tax on Andhra Pradesh vehicles at par with other states was a violation of the Andhra Pradesh State Reorganisation Act 2014.

The petitioners include Kesineni Travels and Diwakar Travels, both owned by Telugu Desam MPs.

The court directed the petitioners to present indemnity bonds at the Telangana border check posts in order to run their vehicles until Tuesday when the petition will come up for further hearing.

At the same time the court asked the other vehicle operators to pay the required entry tax to ply their vehicles while entering Telangana.

The court also issued a notice to the Telangana government to file a counter-argument before Tuesday spelling out its stand on the issue.

Telangana’s government, in its order, said that as Andhra Pradesh was also a separate state like any other state, all vehicles entering Telangana from AP would also have to pay entry tax from April 1.

In fact the Telangana state road transport authority officials started collecting the taxes at all the 14 check posts from Wednesday morning. Their focus was on the check posts bordering Andhra Pradesh specially on the National Highway number 65 between Vijayawada and Hyderabad and National Highway No 44 between Bengaluru and Hyderabad, which passes through Rayalaseema region of AP.

The order was issued on Monday to come in to effect from the midnight of March 31 in accordance with the time frame set by the earlier Government Order No. 43 issued by the governor in June last year.

Telangana government’s move has evoked a strong reaction from the private bus operators and other vehicle owners of Andhra Pradesh as they argue that they should get an exemption from entry tax as they were part of the same state until last year.

As a protest against the imposition of tax, all the private operators have taken their buses off the roads. Police officials said that there had been no untoward incident on any of the border check posts as most of the vehicles were paying short term entry tax for a week or three months.

Kesineni Nani, TDP’s MP from Vijayawada said that his company has paid fresh taxes on all 100 buses of his company which enter Telangana from different check posts as it does not want to cause hardship to the passengers.

In Nalgonda district, which shares the longest border with AP, authorities have collected Rs6.6 million (Dh389,235) entry tax on the first day, most of it at Kodad check post on the border of Krishna district. Throughout the state it was expected to be between Rs20 million to Rs30 million by Wednesday evening, officials said.

Overall, 750 buses, including those of state owned RTC are run between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana every day.