Telangana: Discount On Traffic Challans Draws Massive Response, Rs 5.5 Crore Collected On Day 1

At the peak hours between 10am and 2pm, the number of challans cleared per minute breached the 1,000-mark

New Delhi: The Telangana traffic police’s one-time opportunity of giving concession on challans has yielded unprecedented response on the first day on Tuesday. In a surprising manner, 800 to 1,000 challans were cleared every minute and an amount of Rs 5.5 crore was collected on a single day.

The drive, that was started from Tuesday (March 1), will continue till March 31, as per the traffic department.

“There was a tremendous response from the vehicle owners to clear their pending challans at a discount. We expected that around two lakh challans would be paid on day one, but to our surprise till 6 p.m. around 4.1 lakh challans were cleared and another lakh in the evening,” The Hindu quoted Traffic Inspector (e-challan) M Narsing Rao as saying.

At the peak hours between 10am and 2pm, the number of challans cleared per minute breached the 1,000-mark, the officer added.

Rao further said that due to the tremendous online traffic, the e-challan did face a few technical glitches, however, it thankfully did not crash.

Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Hyderabad, AV Ranganath said that the actual value of the challans cleared would be around Rs 20 crore but due to the heavy discount, a total amount of Rs 5.5 crore was collected on the first day.

“As the system was running slow due to the heavy volume of public accessing our echallan website, we will further scale it up to meet the increasing demand,” the officer told the news organisation.

Earlier, a senior IPS officer had told The Hindu that in a bid to clear over six crore pending challans, the state had decided to kick start this one-time opportunity by offering a whopping 75% discount on outstanding amount for two and three-wheelers and 50% for Light Motor Vehicles and Heavy Motor Vehicles. A large number of challans also pertains to not wearing helmet or overspeeding.

Even the TSRTC bus drivers who were slapped with thousands of traffic violation challans, will now have to pay only 30% on the outstanding amount after the concession under the new offer.

Another offer pertains to a 90% discount on challans raised over non-wearing of face masks during the Covid pandemic and 80% discount on challans issued for pushcarts. 

According to Ranganath, 80% of the challans cleared on Tuesday are mainly from the three urban commissionerates — Hyderabad, Cyberabad and Rachakonda. He also requested the people not to be in a hurry to clear the challans as the discount is valid till March 31.