The Tirunelveli City police have erected flex banners in several parts of Tirunelveli and Palayamkottai telling motorists about the fine to be slapped on them as per the recently amended Motor Vehicle Act if they violate traffic rules. “If you obey the traffic rule, you can save a huge sum of money,” says the flex banner with neatly tabulated fine amounts that run into a few thousands of rupees for each violation.
However, most motorists here, particularly bike riders, continue to violate the traffic rules – right from riding bikes without helmets, three persons riding on a bike, rash driving, bikes zooming past with modified silencers and with banned horns, car drivers not fastening seat belts, driving vehicles under the influence of alcohol etc.
According to Tirunelveli City Police, bike riding without helmet is a major violation. The city has witnessed the deaths of 55 motorists from January to August 31 this year. Though this number has fallen from 75 during the corresponding period last year, thanks to visible policing, the number underlines the need for wearing helmet by bike riders.
“We’re conducting awareness programmes in schools and the colleges in a sustained fashion to tell the younger generation about the need for wearing helmets. If your son or daughter tells you about the need for wearing helmet, you can never ignore their plea. Hence, we organise road safety awareness programmes in schools. We conduct similar programmes in colleges as most youth come to colleges on their bikes, each costing anywhere between ₹1 lakh to ₹1.50 lakh while a quality helmet that saves their life costs only around ₹1,500. So we tell them about the need for wearing helmets and narrate the cases in which parents had lost their sons in fatal accidents,” says S. Saravanan, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Tirunelveli City, who has started a novel ‘helmet awareness propaganda’ of distribution of tree saplings to bike riders with helmets.
As the drive against road safety rule violators was intensified, 3,882 cases were registered against riding bikes without helmet, 744 cases against pillion riders for not wearing helmet, 1,650 cases for not fastening seatbelts and 891 other cases for traffic rule violations were registered in just five days – between August 27 and 31. Consequently, ₹7.50 lakh was collected as fine from the violators.