BENGALURU: Despite investing close to Rs 30 lakh per CCTV camera to catch traffic offenders, the Bengaluru Traffic police now is being tasked with going through digitally issued chalan manually.
This is because the CCTV camera fails to identify the fancy number plate correctly.
Following snapping the image of the vehicle that caused a violation, the camera registers a complaint against the number it identifies. But as the camera reads the fancy number plate incorrectly, the complaint is filed against this incorrect number.
Hence, the department has been verifying each and every challan made by these cameras manually to avoid the errors.
The fancy number plates decreases the performance of these costly red light violation detection cameras (RLVD) installed by the department. Several commuters have complainants to the department of being wrongly fined owing to this.
“We have been receiving many complaints from the commuters that their vehicles have been booked wrongly. This happens because many of the violators have defective number plates, which tricks the camera to cause errors. Hence we are verifying each and every challan manually, which takes a lot of time,” says a senior official from Traffic department.
Once the number of vehicles with fancy number plates comes down, the following manual procedures can be restricted.
“We will now focus on booking cases against vehicles with defective or fancy number plates,” says R Hitendra, Additional Commissioner of Traffic. He adds that the traffic department will slowly decrease the manual case booking procedures and will emphasise on enforcement with the help of cameras. In October 2016, RLVD had booked 1,64,700 cases and in November it was 2,42,899.
The number came down to 2,025 in December 2016 because the department had been examining it manually. In January this year, the camera has booked 8,994 cases. The department had installed 10 Red light violation detection cameras (RLVD) recently in the city.