Traffic violations: ₹23.25 cr collected in over 9L cases in 6 months

CHENNAI: After the inauguration of call centers to dial traffic violators and ask them to pay pending fines, Chennai police have shown a steady rise in collection of fines from traffic violators.

In the past six months, Greater Chennai Traffic Police (GCTP) has collected about Rs 23.25 crore, including over Rs 6 crore for drunken driving cases, in over 9 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, which deteriorated with time as many violators did not pay the fines.

Facing this problem, Chennai police decided to introduce the call centre system and Commissioner of Police, Shankar Jiwal inaugurated ten call centers on April 11 this year. Later, two more separate call centers were launched.

A performance analysis of the call centers since their day of inauguration till October 10 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 6.07 crore was collected in 6,108 cases as most of the violators were fined Rs 10,000 each.

Apart from these, fine worth Rs 15.6 crore was collected in newly reported 5.3 lakh cases, amounting to a total of Rs 23.25 crore in six months.

To improve the facilitation of payment of fines, Greater Chennai Traffic Police has also started bulk SMS system, including payment facilitation centre and partnering with payment platforms by using QR Codes, an official release said.