BENGALURU: Bengaluru Traffic Police have registered complaints at the rate of 20,308 per day over the last 10 months, leading to 61.73 lakh complaints related to various traffic offences between January and October. This is following the record set by BTP in 2017, where it had registered 1.01 crore cases - the first time it had registered more than one crore cases.
The reduction in the number of complaints has been largely attributed to increased awareness on traffic rules and a two-month election period earlier this year. During the 10 month period, BTP has collected fines to the tune of Rs 61.96 crore and is projected to collect around Rs 75 crore as fines. Last year, the amount of fines collected had breached the Rs 100 crore mark - also for the first time - after fines for drunk driving and other traffic related offences were collected.
The decrease in cases and collection of fines was proportional to the decline in cases such as drunk driving, driver/pillion rider without helmet, reckless driving and over-speeding. In all these categories, the least number of complaints are expected to be registered in 2018 as compared to the two previous years.For instance, in rider without helmet category (most common case), 11.67 lakh cases have been registered in 2018 till October 30. While they are projected to file close to 14 lakh complaints by the year end, they had filed 20.19 lakh complaints in 2017 and 18.86 lakh in 2016 under the category. Similarly, instances of pillion rider without helmet decreased from 16.99 lakh in 2017 to 9.73 lakh in the first 10 months of 2018.Similarly, data available with The New Indian Express shows that cases of drunk driving has also decreased during the period with only 33,324 complaints till October 30 as compared to 73,741 complaints in 2017.
While Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) P Harishekaran was unavailable for comment, sources in the Traffic Police Department said that the decline in the number of cases was due to increased awareness among motorists in the city.
Sources added that hectic political activity in the state between March and May was one of the causes for the reduction in the number of complaints. Since most of the police personnel were involved in various responsibilities involving elections, it might have affected the enforcement activity of BTP, he added.