3,000 bikers fined for sporting fancy number plates in Pune, ₹1.50 lakh collected

After taking strict action against riders of Royal Enfield Bullet bikes with modified silencers, the Pune traffic police have trained their guns on riders of bikes with fancy number plates

After taking strict action against riders of Royal Enfield Bullet bikes with modified silencers, the Pune traffic police have trained their guns on riders of bikes with fancy number plates. As many as 3,000 such bike riders have been intercepted in the past three weeks and a total ₹1.50 lakh has been collected from them in fines with a spot fine of ₹500 per violator.

As many as 3,000 such bike riders have been intercepted in the past three weeks and a total ₹1.50 lakh has been collected (HT FILE PHOTO)

DCP (traffic) Vijay Kumar Magar said that the fines were recovered from riders of bikes with fancy plates and that these plates were removed on-the-spot by a mechanic as part of the legal action against them. “The action against the violators has been spread out over three weeks as having fancy number plates amounts to violation of the traffic rules and Motor Vehicles Act,” he said.

Magar explained that there is a specific legal format and that the size of words on the number plate is fixed as per the traffic rules. “In some cases, the fancy number plates feature fat alphabets in Marathi while in others, the actual numbers are very small in size due to which they cannot be deciphered by the camera. Many criminals tend to take advantage of these number plates and go undetected while citizens who obey the traffic rules are erroneously fined,” he told Hindustan Times.

The traffic police in their report to the higher-ups said that the action became imperative as the police could not trace the whereabouts of two-wheelers with number plates bearing words such as ‘Dada’, ‘Mama’ and ‘Kaka’. The CCTV surveillance system was unable to catch such number plates, making it difficult for the police to catch the violators. So much so that challans were wrongly sent to people other than the violators in many cases.

Earlier, the traffic police had issued an advisory stating that while preparing a number plate, dealers should keep photocopies of the concerned vehicle documents or RC books in their registers. For that, a separate register should be maintained and vehicle records should be kept in it according to the ‘number plate’. Further, the rider of the two-wheeler or owner of the two-wheeler garage should not alter the original mould of any two-wheeler without the prior permission of the department of transportation. If any fancy number plates are observed instead of the real number plates, offences should be registered against the violators. Making unauthorised alterations to vehicles and alterations to the number plates of vehicles is a violation of the Central Motor Vehicle Rules. Traffic rules stipulate that vehicle numbers are written in black colour on a white plate. Using fancy words or other such is against the transport rules, the city traffic police said.