Bengaluru Police Billboard Will Name And Shame You For Car's Pending Fines
Challans and fines play key roles in enforcing traffic and lane rules in India. Violators are often slapped with fines. These days, an advanced e-challan system is used to pick out violations and issue fines. Many vehicle owners, however, falter in paying these on time. Cases in which a vehicle ends up having multiple unpaid challans aren’t rare. The government has lately been devising various initiatives to recover unpaid challan money from owners. Odisha recently announced a one-time scheme that would allow owners to settle serious fines at heavily discounted rates. A new AI-powered billboard has now been set up in Bengaluru to call out vehicles for their pending challans or expired pollution certificates.
This display has been set up at the Trinity Circle, a prominent transport hub in Bengaluru. This intersection witnesses heavy traffic on most days. The billboard will display the registration plate and the violation committed, every time a vehicle with a pending challan/ expired PUCC comes to its notice.
This system uses AI-powered cameras to scan the traffic around and collect data from vehicle number plates. The system then uses these to fetch the latest data from the VAHAN database and see if there’s a violation or pending challans attributed to it. If so, it is displayed on the billboard!
All this is claimed to happen in under 10 seconds, and the camera units reportedly have a range of 100 meters. Yes, there are a lot of similarities between the way this system works and how the AI cameras at a fuel station (that call you out if you don't have a valid PUCC) work. Both use AI camera-based plate detection and VAHAN data to identify, analyse and call out violations.
Bengaluru’s new billboard is, in fact, a pilot project, and has been set up with the involvement of Cars24, CrashFree India, and Monday Ventures. The city’s traffic police sees this as a nudge towards safer and more responsible driving. More of these boards will be set up in the future, based on reactions to and learnings from the pilot.
The city is infamous for its traffic chaos. It has over one crore registered vehicles, with around 30,000 traffic violations recorded every single day. In 2024, the traffic police booked 82.90 lakh cases and collected fines worth ₹849.14 crore.
Between January and August 2025 alone, more than 45 lakh violations were recorded, bringing in ₹1,150.33 crore in penalties. In September alone, Rs 106 crores were collected in fines in just 20 days, driven by a one-time concession of 50% on pending challans. The new billboard-based system will likely encourage more vehicle owners to clear their fines.
The AI-powered billboard might look like a smart solution at first. A closer look at it might raise major questions about possible safety compromises. Roads near the Trinity Circle are densely populated with vehicles and people during most hours of the day.
A huge screen displaying his vehicle’s number plate and violation can possibly distract the driver. He may then look at the board and try to figure out what he has been flagged for.
He would then have to look past the brandings (not one, but three of them!) and the ‘passing Trinity Circle right now’ to finally read about the actual violation.
All this while this driver can be a threat to the safety of people and the traffic around, as he would have to take his eyes off the road and focus elsewhere. It will be a shame to the project if such a crash occurs.