Third eye to arm, rein in inspectors

NEW DELHI: The enforcement wing of Delhi’s transport department is going high-tech. Starting this month, enforcement inspectors will wear body-worn cameras, which will live-stream challans being issued to the department’s operations control room.

In November last year, the enforcement wing switched from manual challans to e-challans. From this month, the department will get body-worn cameras, which will ensure transparency in the process of issuing challans and will curb alleged corruption in the process.



“Body-worn cameras are likely to be deployed from this month and each one of our 60 enforcement teams will be equipped with a body-worn camera each,” said KK Dahiya, special commissioner (transport). Dahiya said the process of procurement of 60 cameras is complete and these will be provided to inspectors on the field very soon.

The special commissioner said that not only will the entire shift of every team be recorded; the recordings will be live-streamed. “These recording will be monitored at our operations control centre, which, thanks to the Wi-Fi enabled cameras, can be seen live,” he said. Dahiya added that instances of name dropping by violators, which is quite rampant, will come to a stop thanks to the presence of these cameras.

There have been recent instances of enforcement officials getting killed while performing duty after being run-over by vehicles. “Two of our personnel recently died while performing their duties when they were trying to stop vehicles. With the teams now getting cameras, we will be able to pin-point such vehicles easily and fix responsibility,” he said.

The department has gone for the latest body-worn cameras available in the market. “We have already started issuing e-challans and now with these cameras, the department would become the most high-tech transport department in the country,” he said. “Thanks to e-challans, we have been able to nab repeat offenders, who have to pay a heftier fine as per rules,” he added.

Delhi Traffic Police also boasts of body-worn cameras provided to substantial number of their personnel but unlike the body-worn cameras being procured by the transport department, the former doesn’t have the live-streaming feature.