Following the lead of Karnataka which gave BlackBerries to traffic policemen in Bangalore to record traffic violations nearly four years back, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are using the latest technology in traffic enforcement and reducing human intervention. In Chennai, traffic policemen have been provided 300 smart multi-task handsets. After the success of the Chennai experiment, the state government has floated tenders inviting bids for setting up an integrated management system capable of detecting traffic violations and generating tickets or challans along with photographs of the violating vehicle and the violation. The system will also be able to locate and alert the police about stolen and missing vehicles, suspects and VVIPs. In the beginning, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras would be installed at 100 traffic junctions in Chennai. The ITMS will integrate these 100 junctions and 67 traffic police stations with the Control and Command Centre at the Chennai Police headquarters through a dedicated wireless network.
The Andhra Pradesh police has opted for a combination of fixed CCTV cameras and smart devices. 355 CCTVs and 800 mobile cameras have been bought with an investment of र10.8 crore. While the CCTVs automatically capture the violations and pass on the data to the Central Control Room which generates the challans, the policemen with mobile cameras on the street can also click photographs of violations and download them onto their computers. Clear pictures are transmitted to the control room for printing the challans. Meanwhile in Karnataka, encouraged by its success in Bangalore, the state government has extended the Blackberry experiment all over the state, providing 1,000 Blackberries to officers throughout the state.