The Kerala Police have introduced Blackberry mobile solutions for speedy,tamper-proof tracking and settlement of traffic rule violations in Kochi city,on an experimental basis. According to Kochi police commissioner Manoj Abraham,the system would enable the traffic police to penalise an offender on the spot. Once an offender is spotted,the vehicle number would be fed into the Blackberry provided to the traffic police personnel. The phone would soon display the profile of the vehicle,its owner/driver and other necessary details from the online data bank of the Motor Vehicles Department,which has networked all the regional transport offices in the state. The receipt for paying the compounding fee would be printed from a handheld device. Besides,the Blackberry sets would also take pictures of the traffic violations to convince the driver about his offence. At a later stage,the history of traffic violations of a driver or vehicle,if any,could be provided on the spot. The technology for the experiment is being provided by Vodafone,in association with the Thiruvananthapuram-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing. Vodafone gave three Blackberry 8700 handsets to the city police on Wednesday,the day the new system began operational. We are planning to deploy 40 handsets within the city area at a later stage, said the commissioner. The initial response from the road is encouraging. While implementing the scheme on a larger-scale,the police would go for a long-term arrangement with a mobile service provider who would be selected through an open tender, he added. Apart from Kochi,the technology to tackle traffic offenders would also be introduced in Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode.
