CHENNAI: Ever been pulled up by a traffic policeman for an offence you committed, and seethed inside when an MTC bus got away scot-free after jumping a signal? Your anger might be slightly misplaced. For, MTC buses have been fined a whopping 5,709 times this year till November alone, according to data available with the Chennai City Traffic Police (CCTP).Wait! Whatever silver lining this piece of information might have given you, will turn into a gnarled thread in the light of the fact that the MTC is actually yet to cough up all the money for these fines. An approximate calculation made by City Express showed that MTC had paid up only 29.15 per cent of the fines that the CCTP had imposed since 2008.Sanjay Arora, who was the city’s traffic police Additional Commissioner till recently, says there is always a lag in the payment of fines, as MTC has to collect the fines from each offending driver and then remit it to the CCTP. He adds that his department has not held any meetings with the MTC management to find a solution to the problem of truant drivers.“Disciplining MTC drivers is a problem. The drivers violate the traffic rules even if they are very much aware of them. So our role ends with fining them and we can’t go beyond in helping the MTC management to curb traffic offences by their drivers. So, any step in this direction should come from the MTC management,” says Arora. Arora admits that the number of instances in which the CCTP has fined MTC is no reflection of the number of violations by the bus drivers. “CCTP has 250 enforcement officers covering 3,000 kilometres of road space. In any case, the process of booking an offender takes some amount of time, notwithstanding the time that the offenders spend in arguing or intimidating the officer. Still, there are only a limited number of cases that we can book,” he says. “We are booking two and a half times the violations that we were doing till June. There is a huge number of violations taking place,” Arora adds.
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