Traffic violators on arterial roads will soon get e-challans at home

Chennai Traffic Police extend TROZ project to Anna Salai, EVR Salai & Kamarajar Salai, with ANPR cameras & e-challans for violators. Speed display boards & other initiatives also introduced.

Those who violate the traffic rules on Chennai’s arterial roads —Anna Salai, EVR Salai (Poonamallee High Road), and Kamarajar Salai (Beach Road) — may not be caught by the traffic police any more. But they will not go scot-free either.

They will get e-challans at their home as the Greater Chennai Traffic Police will extend their Traffic Regulation Observation Zone (TROZ) project to these thoroughfares. The speed display boards may also start generating and sending e-challans in the immediate future.

With assistance from Hyundai, the traffic police had established the TROZ at Anna Nagar roundabout in 2019. Under this initiative, modern CCTV cameras were installed to capture the images of vehicles violating traffic rules.

The traffic policemen were manually generating e-challans based on the images from the CCTV cameras and dispatching them to the vehicle owners by post.

Since the number of violations was so huge that the police could not generate as many challans, the National Informatics Centre (NIC) was roped in and the database of vehicle details was linked. The TROZ, upgraded with automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, was relaunched in 2021.

The ANPR cameras were installed at Anna Nagar roundabout, Anna Nagar police station roundabout, Shanthi Colony junction, 100 Feet Road-Ambattur Estate Road junction, and Anna Nagar West Depot-18th Avenue junction. These cameras are capturing violations such as signal jumping, stop-line crossing, wrong turn, over-speeding, triple riding and riding without helmets.

Now the cameras generate the challans, which are sent to the violators, with their addresses collected from the Vahan portal. Instantly, an SMS is also sent to the violators’ registered mobile numbers. Over 2,000-2,600 challans are being generated from the TROZ daily.