Traffic police fail to live up to pre-CWG project promises

Before the start of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Delhi Traffic Police had come up with a host of promises for commuters including a real-time update of the traffic situation. Three years on, most of them continue to remain only on papers. Subhendu Ray reports.

Before the start of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Delhi Traffic Police had come up with a host of promises for commuters including a real-time update of the traffic situation. Three years on, most of them continue to remain only on papers.

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Some of the initiatives, including the ambitious design where the police aimed to stay in touch with commuters through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and through text messages and interactive websites, have now either lost momentum or have remained a non-starter.

While the traffic situation update through SMS was suspended six months ago, the traffic police’s interactive website project never managed to take off.

Activities like seeking suggestions for improvement in policing through Facebook and Twitter have also seen a sharp drop. The SMS service of the traffic police was suspended just a few days before the December 16 gang rape.

After the suspension of the service, restrictions on traffic movement were imposed on many arterial roads to restrain protesters. The curbs on traffic movement led to major jams, with most of the commuters caught unaware.

Sudhir Yadav, special commissioner of police (traffic), admitted that some of the projects had failed to achieve their targets. He, however, indicated revival of these projects with value addition soon.

“The SMS service had become very expensive for us, so we suspended it. We used to pay about two paise per SMS that was later hiked to 20 paise,” he said, adding that the traffic police now are trying to revive it with the help of a private party.

Similarly, the interactive website would be launched fresh and can be accessed through computers as well as smartphones.