Drunk driving: Mumbai police to launch e-challan for repeat offenders

Mumbai, Jan 2: In an attempt to identify repeat offenders in drunk driving cases and penalise them with stricter punishments, Mumbai traffic police will start issuing e-challans from this month.

Officials have revealed that records of the past eight years are now being digitised and the e-challans will be issued to repeat offenders once they are caught. According to official records, drunken driving offenders shows an increase in 2015 with 18,035 cases of drunken driving in 2015, visa vie 16,013 in 2014. On the New Year's eve, close to 705 offenders were caught, visa vie 532 caught in 2014.

JCP (Traffic) Milind Bharambe said,"We have observed that a fine of Rs 2,000 is no longer a matter of concern for most people, and that many of the offenders are repeaters. We are currently digitising our records of drunk driving offenders and will be issuing e-challans to offenders from this month."

"The e-challan will be linked to our computerised database and will immediately identify repeat offenders. If we find that a particular offender has been caught three to four times, we will put this fact in front of the court and appeal for a punishment of at least one or two days behind the bars for offenders for whom repeated imposition of fines seems to have no impact."

"The existing mechanism to identify repeat offenders is a flawed one, making it easier for the offenders to pass themselves off as first-timers. The traffic police are hoping to iron out this kink with the introduction of e-challans. If a person is penalised by the same traffic chowky more than once, it can be easily found out. However, if a person fined by the Colaba chowky earlier is caught by the Dahisar chowky the next time, it becomes more challenging for our personnel to find out."

He further added,"The thought that ‘it is easy to get away with driving under the influence of alcohol' needs to be changed. This is what our anti-drunk driving campaign has been targeting."

OneIndia News