Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad Traffic Police were facing severe shortage of staff and vehicles to enforce smooth traffic flow on busy roads of the federal capital.

A senior official of the ITP told this scribe that the department was functioning with the same strength of 649 and resources since its introduction in 2005.

The department has only 46 vehicles out of which 19 are non functional, he said, claiming that the ITP was performing best despite lack of resources.

Earlier in 2013, the ITP had written to the Interior Ministry with repeated reminders to enhance the strength of capital’s traffic police to 2,200, which was insufficient to control the traffic of the whole city, besides performing VVIP duties throughout the year.

Currently, the capital city is divided into four zones while the ITP has proposed to add more three zones as residential areas and road networks have expanded and its population is now almost double as compare to 2005, he said.

According to a census conducted a few months back, he said that 337,556 vehicles daily travel on the busy roads of the capital. He said resources of ITP were not increased accordingly that was creating hurdles in performance of the department.

He said several rural areas had become part of the city due to increasing population and heavy deployment was required there but the ITP was still unable to do this due to shortage of staff.

The official said the department had introduced one window operation to end long queues of licence seekers at ITP office.

He said that the capital traffic police was trying its best to discipline the traffic on roads but there was a need to add resources in accordance of city’s rapidly increasing requirements to check violations.

He said that sharp U-turn should be replaced with ‘fish belly’ to make the highways signal-free for smooth and uninterrupted flow of traffic on roads.

He said ITP was serving the public day and night, and one could see the traffic personnel performing their duties in all kind of circumstances like hot weather, raining and during iftar hours.

The ITP department was generating millions of rupees annually through issuing challan tickets to the violators but the Interior Ministry was ignoring the demands of the department and not taking steps to enhance the resources of ITP to boost its performance, he lamented.