Discounted challan payment elicits huge response

At 1,000 challans per minute, around 5 lakh people paid their pending traffic fines

Motorists at a lightning speed have attempted to clear their unpaid challans by availing the huge concession offered by the Telangana police which started on Tuesday. In an unprecedented manner anywhere between 800 to 1,000 challans were cleared per minute.

On day one, officials said that around five lakh challans were cleared with nearly ₹5 crore as penalties being credited into the State’s exchequer.

“There was a tremendous response from the vehicle owners to clear their pending challans at a discount. We expected that around two lakh challans would be paid on day one, but to our surprise till 6 p.m. around 4.1 lakh challans were cleared and another lakh in the evening,” Traffic Inspector (echallan) M Narsing Rao said.

He said that at peak hours (around 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.) the number crossed more than 1,000 per minute, as Mee Seva centres were opened after 10 a.m.

Despite officials making all efforts to handle the expected traffic on their website, occasionally there were instances of technical glitches and as a result loading of the web page took time.

“Yes, as the traffic on the echallan website was much more than what we had expected, it was slow for a few minutes on a couple of occasions, but did not crash,” Mr Rao said, adding that they were using two lines of 1,500 MBPS.