Mumbai: Citizens Caught Driving Without A Licence Goes Up By 150 Pc In Two Years

Mid-Day: Mumbai: Thursday, January 25, 2018.

Call it sheer recklessness or daredevilry, but the last three years have seen Mumbai motorists violate traffic rules blatantly, presenting a strong case for why road accidents have become commonplace. An RTI query by this newspaper has led to disappointing revelations, including a 150 per cent jump in the number of motorists driving without a valid licence.

Mid-day had recently filed a query related to traffic violations between 2015 and 2017. In response to the RTI, the Mumbai Traffic Police department submitted a break-up of the violations, with driving without a valid licence, jumping the signal and talking on the mobile phone, topping the list.

According to the RTI response, in 2015, the traffic police collected a total of R16.92 lakh in fines for driving without a licence. This number went up by 150 per cent in 2017, with R45.5 lakh being collected as total fine for the same violation.

Another major concern for the traffic police was the number of motorists jumping signals, which has increased two-fold since 2015. While the police collected a total of R1.93 crore as fine for jumping signals in 2015, by September last year, they had collected around Rs 2.7 crore.

Similarly, the number of people using mobile phones while behind the wheels, has also gone up five-fold, with the traffic police collecting Rs 30.79 lakh as fine last year, when compared with R6.78 lakh in 2015.

The overall fines for all violations was R26 crore in 2017, which is R5 crore in excess of what was collected in 2015.

However, in a reflection of its strong campaign against motorists riding without helmets, the fine collected for the violation went down by half, from R4.5 crore in 2016 to Rs 2.34 crore last year.

Ashutosh Atre from Road Safe Foundation said that punishments should be made more stringent to prevent motorists from violating traffic rules. "We need a stringent law in place to combat this fearlessness among motorists," said Atre. Amitesh Kumar, joint commissioner, traffic, was unavailable for comment.