LAHORE: The National Highways and Motorway Police have launched an awareness campaign titled “Hamari Aankhein Banein” — Be Our Eyes — to bring passengers’ complaints directly to the police.
According to Motorway Police spokesperson Syed Imran Ahmed, complaint QR code stickers have been affixed to passenger vehicles. Passengers will be able to scan them and register an immediate complaint against a driver.
According to the Central Region spokesperson, the QR code will allow passengers to report overloading, the charging of excess fares, dangerous and unsafe driving, misbehaviour and other traffic violations to the Motorway Police.
Complaint QR code stickers have also been displayed at passenger vehicle terminals so that passengers face no difficulty in registering complaints.
The spokesperson said the QR code system will carry passengers’ voices directly to the Motorway Police, and that the accountability of drivers engaged in irresponsible and dangerous driving can be made more effective.
The Motorway Police helpline 130 also remains available for passengers’ complaints and guidance.
Syed Imran Ahmed said the objective of the “Be Our Eyes” campaign is to empower passengers and to make communication between the public and the Motorway Police more effective in ensuring safe travel on the highways.
Highway passenger transport presents a supervision problem that city traffic does not. A patrol officer sees a coach for the few seconds it passes; the conditions that matter most to passenger safety — a driver who has been at the wheel for fourteen hours, a vehicle carrying more passengers than seats, brakes that were not checked before departure — are visible only from inside the vehicle, and only to the people least able to do anything about them.
Passengers who do notice are structurally disincentivised from complaining. They are mid-journey, dependent on the driver to reach their destination, often travelling alone or with family, and rarely know which agency has jurisdiction over the stretch of road they are on.
A vehicle-specific QR code addresses several of those constraints at once. It removes the need to identify the correct authority, it removes the need to record a registration number, and it can be used silently.
The Motorway Police enjoy a reputation for integrity that few Pakistani law-enforcement bodies match, built largely on a no-cash-transaction culture and consistent enforcement on the M-2 since the late 1990s. That reputation is the campaign’s principal asset: passengers are more likely to use a channel they believe will not be quietly dropped.
Two questions will determine whether the system holds. The first is coverage. Motorway Police jurisdiction extends to national highways and motorways, not to provincial roads or to intra-city routes — so a passenger scanning a code on a stretch outside that jurisdiction needs the complaint routed onward rather than closed.
The second is what happens on the second complaint. A single report against a driver is a data point; a pattern of reports against the same vehicle or the same operator is actionable intelligence, and the value of the system lies in aggregating them. Publishing periodic figures — complaints received, operators penalised, licences suspended — would demonstrate the loop is closed. Without that, a sticker is a sticker.
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