City traffic police are laughing all the way to the bank with technology bringing in the moolah. There is spurt in payment of e-challans with 93 per cent recovery recorded in the current year while the monthly average has shot past the Rs.3.5 crore mark.
The dramatic change follows induction of the newly introduced Portable Digital Assistants (PDAs) easing traffic enforcement in the city.
While only about 27 per cent of e-challans were paid by the motorists in the year 2008, the induction of old PDAs in year 2009 increased the recovery rate to about 50 per cent and the new PDAs, with a mechanism to pay through credit cards, has further increased the recovery.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Earlier, we had to argue with motorists to make them pay the pending e-challans, but the card swiping facility in the new PDAs has practically removed this problem,” a police officer says.
The old PDAs used to show only the list of pending challans, but the new ones have a host of features to make life easier, he observes.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Costing about Rs. 45,000 apiece, the PDAs, made by city-based Mother Technologies, have many user friendly features like better battery backup, a camera to record a violation, card swipe mechanism, facility to raise new challans and showing the pending challans.
“The new PDAs are working better and the success rate of online card transaction is about 75 to 80 per cent,” Additional Commissioner (Traffic) Amit Garg, maintains. Failures in transaction were primarily due to the network-related glitches. The gadgets will also increase the pressure on motorists to follow traffic rules as they will finally be held responsible for their violations, he adds.
Gadget designer and CEO of Mother Technologies Nataraj Kumar is sure that PDAs have a huge potential in streamlining the traffic enforcement system.
“PDAs can be scaled up to include all commissionarates in the State and even include the transport department itself,” he says, adding that they can also be customised to include a host of new features.