Hyderabad Traffic Police booked 6,046 people in just one week for using mobile phones while driving. It is a sharp reminder that one of the most normalised bad habits on the road is also one of the easiest to underestimate.
The special drive was carried out over seven days, and the split tells its own story. Out of the 6,046 cases, 5,810 involved two-wheeler riders. Another 51 involved three-wheelers, while 185 were four-wheelers and other vehicles. That means roughly 96 percent of those caught were on two-wheelers.
This is not just a “people in cars taking calls” problem. It is overwhelmingly a rider problem. That makes the risk more direct and more immediate. A car driver looking down at a phone is dangerous.
A rider doing the same has even less room for error, less physical protection and less time to recover from a sudden braking move, a pothole, a pedestrian crossing or a vehicle cutting across.
Spread across a week, 6,046 cases work out to about 864 cases booked each day. That is far too high to be brushed aside as a few careless commuters. It suggests that handheld phone use while moving remains deeply common despite years of awareness campaigns and repeated penalties.
The listed maximum penalty on the Hyderabad Traffic Police road-rules page for using a mobile phone while driving is Rs 1,000. If every one of those 6,046 cases were charged at that amount, the total would be Rs 60.46 lakh for a single week. The money is not the main point, but the figure helps show the scale of the behaviour. This is no longer an occasional violation. It is a mass habit.
And it is not a new one either. By October 2025, the city had already issued 77,791 challans for mobile phone use while driving, collecting over Rs 7.72 crore in fines. So the latest week-long drive is not exposing a fresh trend. It is exposing how persistent the problem has remained.
Phone use while driving usually gets treated as a lesser offence than drunk driving or overspeeding. It should not. A distracted rider or driver can drift lanes, miss braking points, ignore signals and fail to spot pedestrians in seconds.
National road safety data paints a very alarming picture. In 2022, use of mobile phones was linked to 3,395 road accident fatalities. That is a larger death toll than the one recorded for jumping red lights in the same year.
The two-wheeler skew also points to an execution challenge. Many riders now depend on phones for maps, delivery directions, calls and work alerts. That reality will not disappear because of one special drive.
But that does not make handheld use while moving any less dangerous. If anything, it means enforcement will have to be paired with more disciplined rider habits, including stopping before taking calls, using proper mounts for navigation and not trying to multitask through traffic.
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