The Ahmedabad Traffic Police, in its stock taking after 2002 end, has noticed that of the total 15.33 lakh e-challans issued for traffic violation in 2022, nearly 13.75 lakh defaulters have not paid up. In monetary terms, it amounts to a whopping Rs 102.66 crore, yet to be a recovered. That means, nearly 89.70% of e-challan fines are outstanding.
On the other hand, the city’s traffic department, however managed to tag more e-challans to the traffic norm violators: 14.55 lakh e-challans compared to 10.46 lakh in 2021 — irrespective of whether violators paid up the fines or not.
In India, a challan refers to an official form or receipt of acknowledgement or any other kind of proof document or piece of paperwork pertaining to a police citation.
A vehicle e-challan is a computer-generated challan used by the Traffic Police and is issued to all the traffic defaulters in India. When a traffic challan is issued in your name it implies that you are responsible to pay the penalty depending on the type of offence made by you as per the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. The traffic police department reserves the right to issue a challan to any driver who does not follow the traffic rulebooks while driving.
Offenders are usually intimated by a message on their number linked with the vehicle’s number plate.
However, with such low recovery of penalty, the cost-effectiveness of e-memos is now being questioned. According to documents, the city traffic police department spent Rs 19.38 on making and posting each challan to norm violators in the city and as much as Rs 42.98 on posting them to people outside the city.
Considering the Rs 19.38 cost of each e-memo, the 1.54 lakh challans that bounced back to the department without being delivered in 2021 cost the police as much as Rs 29.44 lakh. This cost got reduced in 2022 when only 78,024 memos returned undelivered, costing the department Rs 14.82 lakh. Asked how do the traffic department follow up on challans that remain undelivered, additional commissioner of police (traffic) Narendra Chaudhary said they take the current address of the norm violators from RTO and update it in their records. “If the violator does not pay the fine despite receiving e-memos three times, we write to the RTO to suspend his/her driving license,” he said.
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