M’lore: Traffic cops go digital with e-challan

TNN

Mangalore, 10 January 2011: Break a traffic rule in the city don’t be surprised to see a cop using his fingers to ’e-challan’ you rather than manually writing out a receipt for you. The Mangalore city police commissionerate has already received six ’e-challan’ machines and would get 14 more and these machines would be distributed to all the police stations across the city in a phased manner.

 

City police chief Seemanth Kumar Singh told STOI that these machines will be used in the core city areas to start with and gradually extended to book traffic violations along NH 17 and NH 48. These machines are user-friendly and officers authorised to use it have already been provided classroom training and on-the-field training with respect to the usage of the machines.

 

Modelled on lines with a similar machine used in Hubli police commissionerate, this machine can be programmed for individual officers authorised to use it. "Each officer is given a password, and this ensures greater transparency in accounting for fines collected by them," he said. Officers at the senior level can use the data from these machines to know the type of offences booked and the vehicles involved in each of these offences.

 

Manjunath Shetty, traffic police inspector who vouched for the user- friendliness of these machines notes that punching a code for a specified traffic violation generates a receipt with the prescribed fine amount. "This cuts out room for arbitrariness and there is fairness in transactions," he says, noting that the earlier complaint from errant motorists was that police officers were arbitrary when it came to fining them for a same offence.

 

The city police has already netted more than Rs 25,000 by way of fines using these machines. Seemanth said, "The data from these machines will enable the senior officers to chalk out strategies to deal with traffic related issues as they have the data on the various types of offences readily available." The challan books that police officers hitherto were using would be replaced in a phased manner and replaced with these machines, he noted.