Soon, e-challans for Delhi traffic violators, more fine on repeat offenders

Errant vehicles will now be easily prosecuted for polluting, overloading or violating traffic and road safety norms.

Come August 1, you will be fined with an e-challan (electronic traffic ticket) if you violate traffic lights or speed limits on Delhi roads. The Delhi Traffic Police will no longer be the sole enforcement agency utilising technology to make the streets of the national capital safer. To control traffic violations, the Delhi government’s transport department will start issuing e-challans to traffic violators instead of manual challans from next month. 

An integrated e-challan system is expected to bring in more transparency in the prosecution of vehicles violating the Motor Vehicles Act. As soon as an e-challan is issued, the owner of the vehicle will get an SMS. The e-challan is especially intended to catch repeat offenders, who are liable to pay higher fines, according to a Times of India report.

With an e-challan system in operation from August, errant vehicles will be easily prosecuted for polluting, overloading or violating traffic and road safety norms.

According to The Times of India, the transport department has procured handheld devices or e-challan tabs, one for each of its enforcement wing teams. 

These devices will be technologically more advanced than the ones being used by the traffic cops at the moment and can act as POS (point-of-sale) machines that would accept fines through credit or debit cards and issue a challan on the spot. There are approximately 200 personnel in the transport department’s enforcement wing.

The e-challan tab will be synced with the central database of the transport department and will immediately identify an offender, who will be issued an on-the-spot fine. The e-challan device will have a portable printer for immediate issuance of e-challans. It will also have an attached portable camera to take a picture of errant drivers and vehicles and send them to the central database. 

The major benefit of these ‘smart’ e-challan tabs would be in identifying and prosecuting repeat offenders, on whom heavier penalties will be imposed. Also, traffic cops would be able to easily identify antecedents of a vehicle owner by entering the registration number of car in the device and it would become easy to find out if the vehicle concerned was ever involved in a similar incident in the past, reported ToI.

Moreover, the enforcement wings would be armed with “body cameras” which would live stream the interaction between an offender and the traffic cop to the department’s control centre in real time, according to a report.

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