Several vigilant Punekars regularly take to X (formerly Twitter) to report incidents of traffic violations to the police. The violations include wrong-side driving, signal jumping, riding without a helmet, triple-seat riding, riding on footpaths, using fancy number plates, riding without a number plate, and driving under the influence of alcohol, among others. However, many of these citizens allege that the police often fail to take strict action against offenders. Even when action is taken, they claim it is so lenient that the violators feel emboldened to repeat the offence. In short, they argue that there is little to no fear of law enforcement among traffic violators in the city.
Meanwhile, when The Free Press Journal got in touch with the traffic police, they stated that they are consistently taking action against offenders. Providing the data, the cops said that they have fined 2,15,793 people for wrong-side driving, while 4,307 were caught riding without helmets from January 1 to April 29 this year.
According to an earlier story carried by this newspaper, the Pune Traffic Police issued a total of 2.67 lakh e-challans in 2024. However, it is yet to recover ₹17.53 crore from 2.33 lakh e-challans, an RTI has revealed.
Nachiket Deshpande, a banker by profession who filed the RTI, said the police should list out the pending cases in order of outstanding amounts and take stepwise measures to recover the fines. "The police should first start with soft recovery through calls and then engage recovery agents if required. If this fails, the violators should be taken to court," he added. "Some out-of-the-box thinking can also be considered. For example, the traffic police could provide access to e-challan data to fuel stations, and they should refuse fuel if more than five e-challans are pending," Deshpande further said.
