Driving a car in Bharatpur? Wear a helmet!

The 23-year-old, Vishnu Sharma, a resident of Kharera village in Bharatpur, was fined Rs. 200 by the Rajasthan police on December 1, allegedly for not wearing a helmet while driving his Maruti Omni in an area falling under Uncha Nagla police outpost on the UP-Rajasthan border.

Sharma said he was driving his van when he was stopped by the traffic cops on the Agra-Jaipur National Highway for checking. Constable Prahlad Singh fined him for not wearing helmet, he said. 

After being fined, Sharma have started wearing helmet while driving the car. “I showed them all documents, but they insisted on imposing a fine. I had fastened the seat belt too,” he said. “I don’t want to be fined again,” he said, when asked why he uses a helmet while driving a car.

It is not mandatory to wear a helmet while driving a four wheeler anywhere in the country at present under the existing traffic rules. Even the proposed amendments in the Motor Vehicles Act, now pending before Parliament do not have any such clause. 

A senior Bharatpur police official claimed he was not aware of the incident. "No such thing has come to my knowledge so far. If it does, then we will investigate," said Suresh Kumar Khinchi, Additional Superintendent of Police, Bharatpur.

Meanwhile, the constable, Prahlad Singh has claimed that he had mistakenly mentioned wrong reason for the challan in the book. “I was actually penalizing him for not wearing the seat belt. In the ‘challan’ book, I had by mistake mentioned the helmet.” he said. 

It is important to note here that it is the same Bharatpur police that had failed to reach an accident spot on time, which was 10 km away from the district headquarters, where 16-year-old Rohit Kumar lay bleeding on the road for an hour and had later succumbed to his injuries.