Hiccups for sugama sanchara in city

Only 9,458 of the 1.5 lakh autos given colour code

The Bangalore City Saptavarna Suraksha Sugama Sanchara’ (BC4S) project of the Bangalore City Traffic Police to provide unique alpha numeric colour coding for all autorickshaws in the city by June-end does not appear to be anywhere close to meeting the deadline. Under the project launched in February, the police intended to verify permit and vehicle documents of 1.5 lakh autorickshaws in the city in a bid to stop autorickshaw drivers without documents from plying their vehicles on Bangalore roads.

Only 9,458 autorickshaws registered themselves under the project by May-end. In view of the poor response to the project, the traffic police may extend the deadline and launch an awareness campaign to bring on board autorickshaw owners who have not been covered under the project. The alpha numeric colour code seeks to create a database of autorickshaws plying in each of the seven police divisions in the city. But, 90 per cent of the autorickshaw drivers and owners have not shown any interest in the exercise.

The unions are unhappy as they were not consulted on the issue before the project was implemented. The unions complain that while they wanted the focus of the project to be on auto drivers, the project actually focuses on the vehicle owners.

Under the project, the code is assigned when the vehicle owner submits the permit and vehicle documents at the Sub-Divisional Assistant Commissioner’s Office. Only later are the documents sent to the Regional Transport Office (RTO) for verification.

Autorickshaw union representative pointed out that the very fact that documents are verified by the RTO only after the code is assigned itself is a lacuna. Besides that the project, in its present form, cannot achieve much because re-sale of autorickshaws is not well-documented. Additional Commissioner (Traffic) B. Dayananada admitted that the project was facing many hurdles. Verifying original documents is not possible because most autorickshaws are bought on bank loans, and their documents are with the bank.

Mysore does better

The Mysore City Police claim that it has become easy for passengers to file complaints against autorickshaw drivers using the unique alpha numeric colour code.

Till date, the unique numbers have been issued to about 23,000 autorickshaws in Mysore, according to Prabhakara Barki, ACP (Traffic), Mysore.

He told The Hindu that the coding of autorickshaws had helped the police to take action against drivers against whom complaints were lodged. The numbers are computer generated and cannot be duplicated. “We need go to the Transport Department as we ourselves have the data of all autorickshaws if we have to act on complaints against drivers.”