THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Motor Vehicles Department (MVD) is yet to recover Rs 33 crore as fine from vehicles that have breached the upper-speed limit. The humongous amount has been accrued since 2014. Though a court order has been dissuading the MVD from blocking services in case vehicle owners fail to pay the fine, the ropey software being used have been termed as main culprits for the accumulation of the fine.
MVD sources said the PSM (Payment Service Module) used for receiving the fine amount is obsolete as it doesn’t have an option to pay fines for multiple traffic violation in a single go. In case an owner comes to file penalty for 20 offences, he needs to do it 20 times separately and the whole process would consume more than an hour.
Sources said this technical handicap dissuade people, who have several traffic offences against their name, from visiting Regional Transport Offices to pay fines.“When the owners come to pay the penalty while visiting the RTO for availing some services – some of them will have 10 offences while some others would be having 15 – they are goaded into approaching e-service providers outside,” said an MVD official.
Those who are to file the fine amount from outside RTO have to pay service charges which vary from place to place. MVD sources said private transport vehicles and those who run private fleets are the worst-hit as they have hundreds of offences for which penalty has to be paid.
“The e-service providers charge a big amount as service charges and because their software is updated, they can pay the fines for all offences in a single click,” sources said. Smart Move, another software being used for preparing notices to be issued to the offenders, has also left a lot to be desired. The software has not yet been linked with PSM despite repeated requests and hence the officials have to check each registration number manually to see if the vehicle has got any penalty to pay.
source:-newindianexpress.
