Traffic violations: Chennai cops collect Rs 11.3 cr fine in 84 days

CHENNAI: After inauguration of call centers to dial traffic violators and ask them to pay pending fines, Chennai police have collected a total of Rs 3.3 crore in the past 84 days in over 2 lakh cases.

Chennai traffic police moved to a cashless e-Challan system from March 2018. While in the initial stages the compliance of payments of fine was good, it deteriorated with time as many violators did not pay the fines. Faced with this problem, Chennai police decided to introduce the Call Centre system and the Commissioner of Police, Shankar Jiwal inaugurated ten call centers on April 11 this year. Later two more separate call centers have been added

A performance analysis of the call centers since their day of inauguration till July 3 revealed that fines were remitted by violators in old cases, including cases registered in 2019.

Personnel from call centers made phone calls and informed the violators about pending violations and exhorted them to pay the fines within a week failing which the cases would be pushed to Virtual courts, an official release said.

As a part of the same exercise, a special drive for payment of fines in drunken drive cases was also launched and an amount of Rs 1.68 crore was collected in 1674 cases as most of the violators were fined Rs 10,000 each.

Apart from these, fine worth Rs. 6.3 crore was collected in newly reported 2.6 lakh cases, amounting to a total of Rs 11.3 crore cases in 84 days.