Chennai: Craze for fancy number plate seems to have reached a new high in Chennai city. On Friday, the traffic police booked a car owner at Koyambedu for having only his name in capital letters on the rear number plate and no vehicle registration number.
To the policemen’s shock, the white coloured Maruti swift just had ‘HIGGINS’ written on the number plate. Police identified the owner as Higgins Ravi, a resident of Porur with a business in Vadapalani. “We got an alert from a senior official saying that such a vehicle was speeding from Vadapalani to Koyambedu side on Jawaharlal Nehru Salai around 11.15 am. By the time the car reached CMBT, we managed to intercept the vehicle,” said a member of traffic enforcement wing.
Initially, the car owner claimed that the car’s rear number plate had come off during the pooja so he just decided to keep his name on the board instead of the registration number. But the police was not ready to buy his version.
“He had clearly violated the law. There is no number on rear side and the number in the front is too small. But we can only extract fine for his offence as we don’t have any evidence to show that the vehicle was involved in any kind of crime,” said a traffic officer.
After slapping a fine on the motorist, the police asked him to immediately change the number plate and also to remove the sun control film from the windshield. A traffic policeman was sent with the car owner to a shop to ensure that he changed the number plate immediately.
It looks like he had managed to dodge the police so far because at every checking point police would be looking at the number plate in front and hardly notice the one at the rear.
Police said they had seen many fancy number plates in vehicles in the city. “But every one will have vehicle registration number written on it in some format. But this man seems to be obsessed with his name and he thought there is no need for a number for his vehicle, instead his name would be enough” a policeman observed.
