LAHORE: The Punjab Safe Cities Authority, PSCA, has collected a total sum of around 55 million Pak rupees against more than 400,000 E-Challans issued in the past three months in Lahore.
According to an official handout issued from PSCA, motorists within the CCTV fencing of Lahore received more than 350,000 tickets for signal jumping, 50,000 tickets for over-speeding and 10,000 tickets for one-way and lane violations respectively.
As part of PSCA, 8000 CCTV cameras have been installed in Lahore at the cost of 12 billion rupees. The project was completed in January 2018. The traffic violations and E challan system was commenced in October.
E challans can be paid in all branches of both National Bank of Pakistan and Bank of Punjab.
While the E-Challans are usually sent out to the violators at the home addresses mentioned at the time of registration of the car, officials have been grappling with the new set of challenges. For instance, the E-challans are being either ignored by motorists or sent at the wrong addresses of the vehicle owners.
According to Dawn, in some instances, the former owners were being delivered the E challans because the buyers did not change the ownership. Legally, the new owners are required to get the vehicles registered in their names within one month of their purchase. According to Dawn, the authorities detected more than 15000 such vehicles, mostly cars.
In order to mitigate these issues, PSCA has undertaken a number of measures. It has launched an online portal where citizens can find out if an E challan has been issued against their vehicle using their CNIC numbers and car registration numbers respectively.
Additionally, violators are being intercepted en route through vigilant ground forces of Dolphin Squad, City traffic Police Lahore and Police Response unit tipped from Police’s Integrated, Command, Control and Communication Center. As a result of these measures, “147 of such motorists paid up to rupees 1 million for a staggering 1987 unpaid and ignored challans,” noted the PSCA handout.
Talal Raza is a Program Manager at Media Matters for Democracy. He has worked with renowned media organizations and NGOs including Geo News, The Nation, United States Institute of Peace and Privacy International.
