How to take joy out of jumping red lights

'Art is anything you can get away with,' wrote Marshall McLuhan in his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage. The quote has also been attributed to Andy Warhol. Neither media theorist nor pop artist was speaking about unpaid traffic fines. But they might as well have.

Rule-breaking is evidently a high art in the low-life roads of Delhi-NCR. Only the other day, I saw a new Delhi government bus speeding on its way to the nearest metro station, neatly jumping a red light at the Delhi-Noida border.

Will the driver pay the fine from one arm of the state to the other? Delhi and UP account for an unpaid amount of ₹22,000 cr in traffic fines linked to e-challans, split roughly evenly between the two. These two states also account for more than half of the country's unpaid traffic e-challans. According to GoI, Tamil Nadu is a comparable good-boy state that issued 6.37 cr e-challans, but had a much higher strike rate in recovery, with only ₹2,122 cr in unpaid dues. Delhi and UP between them issued about 13 cr e-challans.


Much like penalty corners in football, we need to get down to strike rates in this new-age phenomenon in which CCTV cameras and mobile-linked challans are meant to cut down on the work and the presence of traffic cops. Ground realities are different. Alas, behavioural science comes in the way of half-baked e-governance. People are not the same everywhere. Which is why you need a horses-for-courses approach.

Apparently, reasons for e-challans not working in the capital are not only the nature and extent of violations, but also a broader driving culture and behaviour after challans are issued. Accumulation of fines and larger e-challans adds to the woes.

There is a way out. Look no further than highway toll plazas and airport parking lots for guidance. The prepaid, rechargeable RFID (radio frequency identification) stickers are affixed to a windscreen. Overhead readers capture the tag's unique ID and deduct the exact fee to raise the barrier.

Prepaid fines can do the same trick. Before citizens are outraged, one may add that prepaid amounts may be paid at a decent interest rate. The point is that the artists who think they can get away with rule-breaking have a rough idea of what it costs government authorities to levy a legitimate fine in terms of human effort, court hearings, and accompanying official procedures. Turn the whole thing on its head, and the onus of proof shifts from beady-eyed babus to clever drivers, or, in alliterative Hindi, to chalaak chaalaks.

For minor violations, fines deducted from a prepaid escrow account may fetch the exchequer a handsome amount, because most car owners are likely to think it's easier to pay a smaller fine and be done with it than to go and fight in court. Unlike passive CCTV cameras, prepaid scanner tags may quietly wield a badly needed stick.

Based on anecdotal evidence, I dare say that traffic violators are often precocious teenagers, or rash drivers who work for someone who has figured out that managing the state is easier where delays, unmotivated staff and bribes are common.

The morally outraged may cry wolf. But it's pragmatic to reward the law-abiding citizen with a high interest rate rather than tire oneself out trying to punish an elusive rule-breaker who thinks nothing about getting away with it.

More than 80% of traffic challans remain unpaid, as per official data from the past 4 years. The amounts due, strangely enough, match the numbers often associated with politically-charged scams. But since they involve millions of micropayments--and not discretionary decisions by elected leaders or their associates--they attract less controversy.

It is public money, all the same. Taxing people is as much an art as shrewdly jumping a signal. We may, with nationalist post-Independence Day conviction, quote Kautilya, who said that a king must collect taxes gently, the way a bee draws nectar from a flower. That should settle it.