Pramesh S Jain & Yogesh K Porwar
In an effort to improvise on the process of issuing traffic violation notices,the Bengaluru Traffic police on Saturday launched an SMS service to issue notices digitally .
So far the traffic police were using printing violations books to note down the violations and later fill it in FTVR ( field traffic violation report ) , a handheld device to capture violations and generate notices with proof .
The printed notices would then be mailed to the offenders address under section 133 of the Indian Motor Vehicle Act through the postal department.
The entire process was not only tedious but also incurred a huge cost to the department,Dr BR Ravikanthe Gowda,Joint commissioner of Police, ( traffic),said in a official release.
On an average the department would generate 20,000 contactless notices per day and the cost of the postal,print and paper comes up to Rs. 4.50 per notice.
This in addition to efforts taken by the postal and traffic department officials to deliver notices physically to the addresses.
Many vehicle owners have changed their address and the efforts of physical delivery are wasted or doubled,in the process .
In order to overcome all these hazzles,a cost effective and quick SMS service has been launched,Mr.Gowda,said .
Since submitting (providing)a mobile phone number is mandatory at the time of registration of a vehicle,the transport department is sharing the vehicle details and registered mobile numbers of the offenders with the traffic police on a real time basis.
With this facility the traffic police manage to send the SMS notification to the registered mobile number within the seconds of the violations,this would send the details of violations and online payment option.
This is cost effective and compared to the earlier service the cost will be 20 paise per notice in comparison with Rs 4.5 for the earlier service.
This would also reduce the work burden on the traffic police and the postmen.Due to the fast and effective way of alerting the violations, the number of traffic violations would also be reduced and increase awareness among the motorists, he added.
This service also helps the owner of the vehicles to get to know in case if their vehicles are being misused .
The pilot project has already started and will be implemented in full fledged based on the success,says Dr.BR Ravikanthe gowda.
