Gujarat launches virtual traffic court for e-challan disputes

AHMEDABAD: A virtual traffic court was made operational from Wednesday to spare traffic offenders of compoundable offences from appearing before the courts physically and to make it easy for them to pay e-challans.
The Gujarat HC made the e-traffic court functional with an objective to eliminate the need for litigants to appear in the court in person. The virtual court system allows the court users and vehicle owners to complete all the proceedings online. At present, the cities of Ahmedabad, Surat and Rajkot have been integrated with the e-court.
The e-traffic court comes into play if a vehicle owner does not pay an e-challan for 90 days. If any e-challan remains unpaid for 90 days, the e-challan will automatically be transmitted to the servers of the virtual traffic court, which is set up at the metropolitan court campus in Gheekanta here.
Once the virtual court takes up the matter and proceeds to issue notice over an unpaid e-challan, an SMS notice will be sent to the mobile phone of the vehicle owner who can pay the fine imposed by the e-traffic court. The court will take into consideration the pending e-challans and offer an amount to compound the disputes.
However, if the vehicle owner chooses to contest the imposition of fine, the case will be sent to the regular jurisdictional court.
Announcing the launch of the virtual court, a Gujarat high court official said that it has been set up under the aegis of the e-courts project following successful integration of One Nation One Challan project with traffic police challans and RTO challans in the state.
Earlier, the high court had directed the state authorities to speed up the process of establishing a virtual court for payment of e-challans, as a PIL flagged the issue of pending e-challans in the cities.
The pending e-challan amount runs into hundreds of crores of rupees.