55K traffic offenders pay 1.4cr in penalty

Chennai: A vehicle owner in Chennai, who committed 233 traffic offences, was made to pay the fine after a two-year delay, thanks to the new call centre established by Greater Chennai Traffic Police (GCTP) to check on pending traffic challans.
Without an effective follow-up mechanism, GCTP had no clue whether motorists committing a traffic offence paid fines or not.Though three lakh cases were booked every month, less than one-third ended up paying the fine.
To fix this, GCTP established a call centre two weeks ago at ten different locations in the city to contact those with pending challans. When police started preparing the list of numbers to contact, they found out that nine vehicles had committed more than 100 traffic offences. One among the nine was a commercial vehicle, which violated traffic rules 223 times. Also, another 43 vehicles committed 50 or more violations each, according to an official release from GCTP on Monday.
In the last two weeks, the call centres made more than 2,300 calls to inform violators about the fine amount and warned them that their cases will be pushed to virtual courts if they did not pay the amount within the next seven working days. As a result of this, more than 55,800 people paid pending fines worth 1.41 crore in the last eleven days.