Aiming to tighten its grip on overloaded vehicles, the state transport department is considering preparing standard operating procedures to intercept such vehicles using the national highways or passing through the toll plazas.

The decision comes following a high-level meeting of the officials of the state transport department, the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and other stakeholders earlier this week. As informed by sources, the transport department is now gearing up to intensify its efforts to curb overloading. For this, the department has sought the bulk data of vehicles, including the overloaded ones captured by the cameras on toll plazas of the NHAI. The data would be used by the department to issue challans and generate revenue from the defaulting vehicles. The department would also earmark the vehicles that would be offenders of the Motor Vehicles Act and use the data for initiating the required action against those by the enforcement team.

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In addition to the data, the transport department has also urged the IT wing of the National Informatics Centre to develop software for automatic detection of tax defaulting vehicles using the camera feeds for initiating e-challans against offending vehicles passing through the toll plaza.

Notably, the state transport department along with experts of IIT-Kharagpur are working on developing ‘safe corridors’ to curb road accidents and fatalities related to it. For this, few accident-prone roads would be identified and the IIT-Kharagpur experts would help in implementing the required road safety measures on those stretches and help in turning them into ‘safe corridors.’

The transport department has also sought the list of notified safe corridors from the NHAI.