NEW DELHI: Vehicle licence plates will soon be scanned by cameras at petrol pumps to check PUCC (Pollution Under Control Certificate) validity. The move came after a pilot study by the transport department of the Delhi government found that nearly one-fourth of the vehicles plying on city roads were without valid PUCCs.
Transport department officials said that in the course of the study, several violations were captured by Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled cameras. As many as 20,942 vehicles were found without valid PUCCs out of the 88,347 scanned in one month. Thus, 23.7% of vehicles scanned were without valid PUCCs.
Officials said an exercise has been undertaken to send e-challans to the vehicle owners levying a fine of `10,000 for the violation captured on the AI cameras, initially installed only at 25 petrol pumps under the pilot project. However, more petrol pumps will soon come under this initiative.
“Given the success of this pilot, we will now expand it to 100 locations,” a senior official informed. Officials also said that the department is working on a digital solution to extend this AI technology at all petrol pumps in the city.
“A tender has been floated to hire a technology company to prepare an application that will check the validity of PUCCs of vehicles coming to the petrol pumps. The CCTV cameras of the petrol pumps will be integrated into the application. A tender worth `6 crore has been issued for this task,” the official added.
According to the demands conveyed to bidders, the transport department seeks an application to scan the number plates of vehicles and search the directory for the validity status of respective PUCCs within 30 seconds of their arrival to the petrol pumps.
“We expect the application to display the PUCC validity status so that the violator is informed. If the PUCC is not updated within 24 hours, the application should generate e-challan to the vehicle owner,” the official explained. The digital solution shall be installed into the existing CCTV cameras installed at 100 petrol pumps, the officer said, adding, the system shall generate reports on PUCC compliance rates and the number of PUCC renewals.
Before implementation of the project, the company shall conduct a comprehensive survey of infrastructure of petrol pumps and then propose a suitable technological solution considering scalability, affordability and ease of integration.
However, officials also highlighted that the transport department does not have the directory of vehicle owners who travel from neighboring cities to the national capital.
“If the application functions only based on the directory of valid PUCCs of vehicles registered in Delhi, then the vehicles coming from other cities would be fined despite having valid certificates as they would not show up in the records,” another official pointer out.
