CHANDIGARH: Only around one-fourth of people who were sent challans at their homes had paid up in 2020, that is 18,339 of 76,573 violators who received traffic violation information slips (TVIS) at their postal addresses.
Police data showed 1,83,672 TVIS were issued from January 1, 2018, till December 31, 2020, with only 40,875 of them being paid till December 2020.
A maximum of 12,443 TVIS were issued in June in 2020 and a minimum of 109 in April, when the city was under curfew and lockdown to check the spread of Covid-19.
Cops said that most of the traffic violation fines were issued for offences like jumping red light, blocking zebra crossing, and talking over phone. A majority of the violations was caught on police cameras.
A few of the challans were issued after residents uploaded images on the police’s Facebook page or on WhatsApp number.
One of the reasons for low rates of payment of fines, according to police, could be lack of updated addresses on the vehicle registration certificates. In most cases, people caught on camera violating traffic rules had probably shifted from their old addresses to new ones.
Once issued, the traffic violation challans are sent by post to addresses mentioned on the registration certificates, meaning most of the offenders do not get the challan slips. Another factor could be that people living on the outskirts of the city get their vehicles registered on their old addresses in the city.
Cops said TVIS challans were earlier issued against motorists having Tricity registration numbers only. However, since 2018, the traffic police have been sending the TVIS challans to violators of other states, like Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and other districts of Punjab and Haryana.
In 2018, police for the first time forwarded 210 TVIS challans to the court for action and 210 offenders appeared in the court and paid their pending challans. As many as 1,931 challans were sent to the courts last year.
In July 2020, UT administrator V P Singh Badnore launched an e-challaning system in the city, allowing people to pay their fines online but only for compoundable offences. Traffic police also sent bulk SMSes to the violator to pay their pending TVIS challans online. Since then, cops claimed that the number of paid TVIS challans has gone up.