NOIDA: The Uttar Pradesh government’s much-hyped automated e-challan (on-the-spot) system, installed on the accident-prone

Expressway to check errant drivers, has not been functioning for nearly two months now.

Official sources told TOI that the National Informatics Centre (NIC) server’s capacity has been exhausted due to the massive volume of data, including challans, details of violators and photographs of vehicles. Because of this, as many as 50,000 challans are yet to be issued. Traffic police are now manually adding the details of the challans on the

.

In April 2018, the GB Nagar police and the Yamuna

Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) started issuing on-the-spot challans to those caught violating traffic rules on the 165km-long Yamuna Expressway. With this system, cameras installed on the expressway captured speeding vehicles and alerted officials at the Jewar toll plaza about violations and generated challans. The violators were then issued challans once s/he reached the toll plaza.

At present, the on-the-spot

system is being used only at the Mathura toll plaza.

Traffic sub-inspector Dinesh Dhama told TOI that currently, they are adding the data to the NIC server manually. “The problem is that the camera takes multiple pictures of a violator which need to be deleted. At times, the number of the vehicle is unclear and the camera cannot take a clear picture at night. We are in process of sifting through the data and uploading,” he said.

According to officials in traffic police, over 1.5 lakh challans have been issued for speeding at the Jewar toll plaza since the launch of the system, which has been non-functional for the last two months. “We have intimated the same to senior officials but the data is currently being updated manually,” a police officer deployed at the Jewar toll said.

SP (traffic) Anil Jha told TOI that they are coordinating with NIC officials and the problem will be fixed after NIC expands the space on the server. Till then, the data is being manually uploaded by traffic cops at the Sector 14-A office.

Joydeep Shome, in charge of the system at NIC, said that they have not been apprised of any such issue. “There might be some communication gap. Exhausting capacity of server is not a major problem and the same can be easily expanded,” he said.

Meanwhile, experts said with the rising number of mishaps on the expressway, accountability needs to be fixed. “It is easy to blame the server but there is need for presence of police officers at the tolls where people can be asked why they have been speeding and handed over challans,” said Anurag Kulshreshtha, president, TRAX, a society working for road safety issues.