Motorists at a lightning speed have attempted to clear their unpaid challans by availing the huge concession offered by the Telangana police which started on Tuesday. In an unprecedented manner anywhere between 800 to 1,000 challans were cleared per minute.
On day one, officials said that around five lakh challans were cleared with nearly ₹5 crore as penalties being credited into the State’s exchequer.
“There was a tremendous response from the vehicle owners to clear their pending challans at a discount. We expected that around two lakh challans would be paid on day one, but to our surprise till 6 p.m. around 4.1 lakh challans were cleared and another lakh in the evening,” Traffic Inspector (echallan) M Narsing Rao said.
He said that at peak hours (around 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.) the number crossed more than 1,000 per minute, as Mee Seva centres were opened after 10 a.m.
Despite officials making all efforts to handle the expected traffic on their website, occasionally there were instances of technical glitches and as a result loading of the web page took time.
“Yes, as the traffic on the echallan website was much more than what we had expected, it was slow for a few minutes on a couple of occasions, but did not crash,” Mr Rao said, adding that they were using two lines of 1,500 MBPS.
At a concurrent session 41,000 persons were trying to clear the unpaid challans on their vehicles, he said.
The officer clarified that the cutoff date for discounted rates was February 28, and concession won’t be applicable for any challan issued after March 1.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Hyderabad, A V Ranganath said that the actual value of the five lakh paid Challans was about ₹ 20 crore, but after discount the amount collected was ₹ 5.5 crore.
“As the system was running slow due to the heavy volume of public accessing our echallan website, we will further scale it up to meet the increasing demand,” he said.
According to Mr. Ranganath, 80% of the challans cleared on Tuesday pertain to the three urban commissionerates — Hyderabad , Cyberabad and Rachakonda.
He requested people not to be in a hurry to clear the challans as the discount is valid till March 31.
A whopping 75 % discount is offered on the outstanding amount for the two and three-wheelers and 50 % for Light Motor Vehicles and Heavy Motor Vehicles. While there is a 90% discount on challans raised over non-wearing of face masks during the pandemic and an 80% discount on challans issued for pushcarts. Even the TSRTC bus drivers, who were slapped with thousands of traffic violation challans, can also heave a sigh of relief as the new offer gives them a steep discount of 70 % on the outstanding amount and were required to pay only 30 %.
Published - March 01, 2022 08:11 pm IST
