I am lucky to own and drive a vehicle in this country where according to some estimates, more than 50% of the population lives on less than $2 a day. At the same time, I have been unlucky to be driving in one of the densest places in India where average number of cars per family are more than any other city. To manage vehicular traffic of this scale, the government has deployed a large pool of traffic personnel throughout the city. I have been driving for close to seven years now but like many of my friends, I had never been challaned until recently, but with a big difference. I had never been challaned because I drove carefully and never broke any law. On the other hand, almost all my friends were caught breaking traffic rules, a huge number of times, but always got away by bribing the traffic personnel. The stories of these bribes are quiet famous in almost all friend circles. Bribing is considered easy because it is good for both – the general public as well as the traffic personnel. Due to the prevalence of high fines for traffic violations, traffic personnel are easily able to extract bribes from the traffic violators, who also don’t mind giving quick bucks to save themselves from a visit to the licensing office.
Apart from the phenomenon of bribing traffic personnel, I recently got to know of another easy way of getting our challans cleared. I was standing in the queue at the licensing office, waiting for my turn to get my challan cleared when I noticed a person standing upfront. He was arguing at the window that he had been wrongly challaned as he had crossed the lights when the light was green but was challaned for crossing a red light. The officer at the window told him that once a challan is written, it cannot be cancelled and nothing can be done about it. The person resented a bit but finally gave up. So, he was asked to pay the fine. But instead of paying the fine, he asked for a date at the court to get his challan cleared without paying a hefty fine. I could hear his conversation from my place and was somewhat taken aback to hear him asking to be sent to court. Agreeing with the majority opinion, I firmly agree that delay, high costs and cumbersome procedures mark the courts in India, but this person seemed happy to go to court. Not understanding this astonishing demand on the part of the person, I decided to stop him and asked him about the details regarding clearing of challans from courts. He told me how easy it was to get challans cleared from the courts and at the same time, paying lesser fine. However, I realized another reason for the huge number of backlog of cases in our courts.
On the basis of this experience, I visualized this solution which might be able to target a few problems at the same time. But to make things simple and illustrious, I would present my solution with an example:
During 1970s and 1980s, the income tax rates in India were very high, touching a peak of 97.5% at one time. In spite of such a high tax rate, the government revenues were not impressive. Instead high default rate was prevalent, along with unchecked rampant corruption.
After the reforms in the early 1990s, the government gradually brought down the income tax rate to the maximum rate of 30% prevailing today accompanied with huge exemptions. Still, the government revenues have been steadily increasing every year. The default rate has come down drastically. The effect is also depicted in visibly less corruption compared to earlier times.
In a similar way, I believe that reducing the fines for traffic violations can have a positive effect on reducing corruption and a cascading effect on increasing overall tax compliance and reducing burden on the judiciary. With low fines, people would prefer to pay fine and get done with the paper work on the spot rather than bribing the personnel. Certainly people would no more like to go to the court.
It may be argued by some that lesser fines may result in moral degradation and in fact lead to more violations of traffic rules. I do not support this view for the simple reason that frequent small fines would actually end up as more accumulated fines of the people in the long run and at the same time, more revenue for the government. This would also ensure more compliance to traffic rules in the long run.
I would also like to point out that the increase in the fines has not acted as a deterrent to violations of traffic rules and there is no direct relationship between increasing traffic violation fines and decreasing number of violations. In fact, in many places violations have increased with increasing fines. But heavier fines certainly leave ample space for the corrupt practices to grow. There have been instances where a single day’s traffic violations have been more than the collective number for a few preceding weeks.
In this season of scams and hunger strikes, I’ve proposed a modest way to a few problems that I have come across. I would be wrong if I say that this is the best method, or in general there is any one best method, to eradicate all the wrongs in the system. This is just another proposal to improve the system. No system can be successful unless there is cooperation from the general public.
Regards
Chetan Taneja
