The Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s audit report on the Delhi traffic police’s (DTP) e-challan system highlights several issues plaguing it.
The CAG appraised the e-challan system of DTP for the period of 2012-13 to 2014-15 and found that non-updation of court orders and several other problems existed in the system.
For instance, it found that often the differences between the amounts worth which the challans are issued and reflected in the challan is different than the money collected.
Cross verification
“DTP had no mechanism for a cross verification of compounded challans collected from offenders and deposited in circles. The amounts could be both more or less than the entered amount,” the report added.
This mismatch, according to the report, is also found in the absolute number of challans as well. “Audit analysis of the data of central server relating to five selected circles, showed 4,90,776 cash challans during the period November 16, 2013 to March 31, 2015. However, as per the information provided by these circles, a total of 6,37,410 cash challans were made during the same period, leaving the difference of 1,46,634 to be reconciled,” it said citing an example. The reason for this, it explains, was that even after the transfer of the prosecuting officer, the system continued to record challans made by them till they registered their IDs with new circles and sometimes for the machines going for repairs.
The report found that when one of these devices go out of order, it takes time to get it repaired due to which data pending in the device could not be received by the central server due to connectivity problems. “In the process it gets lost and cannot be recovered,” says the report.
Non-integration with banks which is preventing cashless challans has also been highlighted in the report which said the vendor supplying the hand-held device has not upgraded them to provide card-swiping facility.
