The Hindu Business Line : Smart cards for vehicle registration, driving licences by ’08

New Delhi, Sept. 8 People across the country are likely to get smart cards as vehicle registration certificates and driving licences by the start of next financial year.

And all these smart cards would use the common software developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC).

At present various States are at different stages of implementing the plan to issue smart cards for both vehicle registration and drivers licence.

Moreover, there is no uniformity between States in terms of software that they use on these smart cards — while some States use private software (as NIC software was not ready when they started these projects), others use software developed by NIC.

This decision was taken in a meeting of Transport Secretaries and Commissioners of all States and Union Territories, and the Central Road Transport and Highways Ministry held here on Saturday.

“We have decided to start issuing smart cards as vehicle registration and driving licences in all States by March 31, 2008. All the smart cards would be based on a standard software platform developed by NIC. So, States like Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi that issue smart cards based on private software would migrate to NIC’s software,” Mr Brahm Dutt, Secretary, Department of Road Transport and Highways, told newspersons here today.

States such as Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Orissa, Mizoram, Tripura have started issuing smart cards for all vehicles.

However, while some States such as Tamil Nadu have mandated migration to smart cards for all users in a phased manner, some States have decided to issue smart cards to present paper-based registration holders only when they come for renewal, Mr Dutt said.

He added that all the paper-based data would be transformed into electronic form.

A committee headed by the Tamil Nadu Transport Commissioner would monitor the implementation.

Simultaneously, the Central Road Ministry would also sanction a Rs 190-crore project, to be implemented by NIC, to link all the State Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) with each other.

“At present a project is on to link all RTOs within a State, now we would work towards inter-State linkage,” Mr Dutt said.