E-monitoring roads: unpaid fines driving govt. Rethink

Source: The post is based on the article “E-monitoring roads: unpaid fines driving govt. Rethink” published in The Hindu on 8th April 2023

What is the News?

The Government of India has accepted in the Supreme Court that its implementation of Section 136 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 has many problems and required mending.

What is Section 136 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988?

Section 136 was introduced by the Motor Vehicles Amendment Act 2019.

It allows electronic monitoring of roads to prevent such deaths.

It aims to make sure that errant vehicle owners pay the traffic fines issued through e-challans.

What are the challenges in the implementation of Section 136?

Statistics showed that only a minuscule 7.61% of drivers who were issued challans electronically have bothered to pay the fine in the past four years.

Due to this, the impact of the entire exercise of electronic monitoring and e-challans stands substantially reduced by considerably less recovery of e-challan amounts which was in fact intended to deter vehicle owners from committing traffic rule violations.

What are the steps the government is planning to take now?

The government has said that it would take up the exercise of standardization and bring out detailed guidelines to integrate software and hardware with e-vahan/e-challan.

The case before the Supreme Court had also proposed evolving a ‘one nation-one challan system’ with a view to integrate the inter-State systems to effectively e-challan inter-State motor vehicles.