With questions raised over Mysuru traffic police’s ‘eagerness’ to penalise motorists during vehicle checking, especially after the recent death of a motorcyclist on the Ring Road, the police have now proposed some changes to make policing ‘friendly’ and transparent’. They are all set to avoid drives during peak hours to sidestep any inconvenience to the public.
Hereafter, there won’t be vehicle checking in areas having high-traffic density.
An order in this regard from the office of Commissioner of Police was expected in a day or two. The decisions were based on public feedback.
Commissioner of Police Chandragupta told reporters in Mysuru on Friday during meet-the-press programme that vehicle checking would be conducted between 10..30 a.m. and noon and 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. from Monday to Friday. Weekends would be confined to collecting unpaid fines for traffic violations caught on camera.
“The idea is to encourage the public to visit five traffic police stations and pay up unpaid fines on their vehicles. Barring drunken driving checks, no other checking will be allowed on weekends,” he clarified.
Mr. Chandragupta said the respective traffic police stations would announce schedule of checking in their limits and it would be confined to one particular violation; it could be helmetless driving or insurance checking and so on. However, in all accident zones, the checking would be carried out as usual and there won’t be any relaxation.
The Commissioner said only policemen with a single star of the rank of assistant sub-inspector and above were eligible to check vehicles and collect fines. Action will be taken if ineligible policemen did so and they would be shifted out of traffic enforcement.
Out of 5,000 traffic violations reported daily, nearly 4,500 cases were caught on camera and the fines in the remaining are slapped through roadside checking.
“We also want this to come down but unable to do it as certain documents and drunken driving can only be checked through roadside drives, and cannot be replaced by cameras.”
Mr. Chandragupta said he has told the officers not to carry out vehicle checking unless they were wearing bodycameras. It’s a must to ensure transparency and earn public faith in police, he said.
Voluntary checking
The police are also mulling over conducting voluntary vehicle checking where the motorist can get his or her vehicle documents checked and ensure he or she is not committing any violation. “Our policemen won’t be checking but the motorists can go to them on specified days and get the checking done. It’s a novel idea and we want to experiment it perhaps from next month. This will also help the public clear their fines as not all are aware about their pending fines since many might have shifted their homes and the police cannot track them with RCs having old addresses.”
To a question, he said efforts are on to completely stop spot fine system and talks are on with digital payments’ banks for tie-up for facilitating easy payment of fines.
