Bengaluru

Abhishek Goyal

Vasanth Nagar

It seems the corporate bug has bitten the city traffic police as the men in white have rolled out incentives and targets to their men when it comes to booking unruly motorists violating traffic regulations on the city streets. Special cash incentives are also given to those men responsible for towing away maximum number of vehicles in the city. Ironically the decision to announce cash incentives have come at a point when the traffic police have been recieving lot of flak from the general public for their overzealous men often crossing the limits with general public while penalising them or towing crew disappearing with vehicles from street corners. And like in the corporate sector there are no free lunches incity traffic police also as minimum targets have been fixed for each traffic police station and some of the cops claimed that it would be a struggle to meet them every month.“We will be rewarding our men who has booked maximum number of cases at zero tolerance junctions. This will include all forms of violations,”said, Deputy Commissioner, Bengaluru Traffic ( East).The city traffic police have also sanctioned RS 15,000 as cash reward for the personnel in 20 traffic police stations in the east division for towing 8951 four wheelers and 7547 two wheelers in January and February 2017. The total fine amount collected from these violators is RS 79 lakh and Rs 50 lakh respectively. In addition to this, another seven police personnel responsible for issuing maximum spot fine challans at zero tolerance junctions in the city have been sanctioned Rs 20,000 for booking more than 1000 cases in zero tolerance in the first week of March. However, though the traffic cops seem to be not complaining about the cash incentives, some of them pointed out that meeting the regular targets would be an uphill task.They also pointed out that it would also worsen the situation as there were more chances of arguments and scuffle between cops and motorists. “Only recently, a constable was beaten up by the public in. The incident occurred when cops tried to stop a couple of youngsters riding a motorcycle. A team of three traffic personnel asked them to stop as they were riding without helmets. When the bikers did not stop, but came bearing down at them, the cops pushed the motorcycle to save themselves. One cop was stripped in the incident,” he said.A senior traffic police official said that there are fixed minimum targets allotted to each police station. He added that oral instructions are given to achieve these targets when it comes to issuing traffic challans and towing away vehicles from the streets.