The Indian government has revised first time traffic violation fine to make them more realistic and prevent corruption among officials.
The road transport ministry is going to revise the proposed fines for violations by almost one-fifth of what was originally declared in the Draft Road Transport and Safety Bill. While earlier the proposed fine for first time offenders stood between Rs. 2500/- to Rs. 20,000/- for different offences but now the fine has been revised between Rs. 500/- to Rs. 5000/-. A new provision will be introduced to set deadlines for each and evert state to follow the timeframe to bring reforms into action in driving licencing (DL) regime, issuing vehicle permits and fitness certificates by minimizing human intervention.
Sources tell that the road transport and highway minister wants all the states to implement this new law before the deadline or else the Centre can intervene to take up such tasks for implementation of the law since it’s under the “concurrent list”. Officials said Gadkari had a meeting with ministry officials to rework the fines for first offences recently. But he was not in favour of tweaking provision of proposed penalty points that each driver would earn for violating any rule and the provision to suspend and cancel DLs after accumulating certain negative points. The penalty points would be added to the DLs.
Earlier, a lot of organizations and even government entities were against the idea of increasing fines by 25-50 times for not wearing seatbelt or helmet which could attract a Rs. 2500/- fine and a fine of Rs. 5000/- could be imposed for jumping a traffic light from the present Rs. 100/-. They had highlighted how increase in fine would not only let people follow rules but also would push up the rate of corruption by traffic police personnel across the country. The NDA government had taken up the task of introducing a comprehensive bill for road safety after it lost former minister Gopinath Munde in a road crash in the national capital soon after coming to power. The bill has provisions including mandatory car recall, public transport and multi-modal transport besides vehicle safety.
