From Monday, traffic police personnel in Coimbatore will sport hand-held machines to book road rule violators and issue e-challans to them.
Coimbatore City Police got the multipurpose, hand-held system machine from Analog and Digital Labs which runs on a low cost platform named VIOLET (Violation Prevention and Regulation Enforcement).
In order to bring down the accident rate through tighter enforcement of rules, City Police Commissioner A.K. Viswanathan and Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic), T.K. Rajasekharan are planning to bring in a slew of measures to make roads safer.
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The machine is one of the ways in which it has been planned to ensure that people follow rules, police sources said.
The hand-held machine will help in dealing with more cases at a given time.
In the present system, the entire challan — right from driver’s/ rider’s name, driving licence number, nature of offence, section of the Motor Vehicle Act invoked and the fine amount — is written manually and consumes a lot of time.
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With this machine, more cases could be booked and the waiting time for the offender would get reduced drastically.
Manual system
Above all, under the manual system of imposing fines on offenders, previous offence records are not instantly available.
However, with the hand-held machines, details of previous offences could be retrieved instantly and a habitual offender’s licence number could be referred to the Regional Transport Office for suspension or cancellation.
Once the vehicle number is entered, the machine will also indicate if it is that of a stolen vehicle.
According to Shyam Jude, Chief Executive Officer, Analog and Digital Labs, Chennai City Police have procured 10 such devices at a total cost of Rs. 13.50 lakh and the entire Transport Department data base on vehicles has been uploaded onto the system.
The cost includes the cost of the device, software and server.
After trying out the machine in the enforcement drive, city police are planning to go in for more machines either through special funding from the Government or from the Road Safety fund.
Traffic violations will hereafter be booked by Multi Purpose Handheld System (VIOLET) dedicated for Spot Fining System.
The software runs on any android-based tablet or cellular phone and is integrated to a Bluetooth printer to dispatch receipts.
Police officials provided with the device will key in the user name and password to log in to the device and levy spot fine on the offenders/ traffic rule violators.
The officer using the system will key in the driver/ riders license number, vehicle number and within seconds the machine will display the complete details about the offender over 3G to the control room. The machine will work offline as well.
When the police officer keys in the details of the offence, the fine for the corresponding offence will be automatically provided by the device and it allows remittance of fine either on the spot or in court.
Finally, a receipt is handed over to the offender that helps him or her to pay the fine.
The offender may now also be able to pay fines at the web site of Coimbatore City Police.
This facility will become available soon.
At the stroke of a key, senior officers will have access to complete information on the nature of offences and the fines collected across the city on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Instant data
Instant data on nature of offences would help the traffic managers plan enforcement drives to bring down the accident rate.
From the central data base, the police can have an overview of all operations being carried out by this device.
These include details such as in which police jurisdiction the device was used, at what location the fine has been collected, details of the overall fine collected per day, information of which officer had used the system, the time of log in and log out. These could be forwarded or printed out for official records.
Coimbatore City Police have planned to launch the machine on a trial basis on Monday.