Putting the services of the postman who knows your neighbourhood well to good use, the traffic police has eased the burden of its personnel while at the same time making delivery of e-challans faster.
BCCL
After a tie-up with the Department of Posts, as many as 1.5 lakh e-memos were cleared by the mail carriers who started delivering the notices to the traffic rule offenders on February 4.
The e-memo project was started in October last year to penalise offenders caught on surveillance cameras. There are 226 CCTV cameras at 82 places in the city that capture the traffic rule violators, which in turn generate the e-challans at the surveillance control room at police commissioner's office in Shahibaug. On an average 5,000 e- challans are generated daily.
Once the number of notices touches around 25,000, a postal staffer will collect them. Once sorted out, they will be delivered to respective post offices for dispatch through speed post to the said addresses.
"Earlier, the e-challans were delivered by police personnel of PCR van, warrant & summons duty personnel.As many as 200 cops were engaged in distributing these notices. They had to spend a lot of time, money and resourced?in this exercise which also resulted in policing duties suffering and their work piling up," said a police official.
BCCL
DCP (Traffic) Sudhir Desai who is also the in-charge additional CP said, "Ahmedabad traffic police signed an agreement with the Department of Posts for the delivery of e-challans. We will pay Rs 15 for delivery of e-challan which is the rate for a speed post within the city. The agreement can be called off with a one-month notice by either side."
Handing over e-challan to the postal department will ensure that people receive the notices on time as postmen are well-versed with their respective areas, believes the police official. "Earlier, the workload of the cops had gone up and it was affecting their regular work like patrolling duties. Over 1.5 lakh e-challans that were generated have now been cleared by the postmen," Desai said.
According to Navrangpura postmaster V K Darji, "Once the e-challans reach us, it takes one day for us to deliver it in the city by speed post and a couple of days outside. This is a good initiative but is likely to add to the postman's workload. At present we have a sanctioned strength of 43 postmen, of which we are short of 8 persons, but recruitment is on to fill the posts."
BCCL
There are 11major offences, including not wearing helmet or seatbelt, breaking signals, use of a cellphone while driving, driving on the wrong side, driving in BRTS corridor and wrong parking that attracts an e-memo.Once a notice is received, the violator has to visit the traffic police station with the vehicle registration documents and pay the fine.