Driving licences: Cops seek smart cards to beat forgery

The Bandra police had,on a tip-off,arrested Ram Manohar Sinha,48,and Zakir Hussain,38,for forging licences and badges used by rickshaw and cab drivers. “We got the tip-off from a driver who had availed himself of their services for getting a fake licence,but had later got into a dispute with them,” an investigator said.

The two men have been running this racket for the past 10 years. According to investigators,the forms used for forging the licences were genuine and had been procured from the regional transport office (RTO). The forgery,they said,was so well executed that it is almost impossible to identify them from the original ones.

“Most small-time forgers are not so particular about their work and often end up using sub-standard materials for making licences that can be easily identified. However,in this case,the licences look so genuine that even the RTO officials and traffic constables could not identify them,” said sub inspector Nitin Patil,one of the investigators.

Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sanjay Barve said the probe will now focus on how the forms were procured from the RTO. “In such a scenario,the only way to prevent such forgeries is to make all licences computerised.”

However,when contacted about the progress on the process of computerising all driving licences,Transport Minister Surup Sinh Naik said he is not aware of it. He said,“the fact that the licence forms were procured from the RTO itself suggests that both Sinha and Hussain had a source inside the RTO. We have narrowed down on the source and will arrest him in a few days.”

According to Patil,the number of fake licences being used in the city could be more than 3,000. “When Sinha was arrested,he had around 50 fake licences that he was supposed to hand over in the same week. Moreover,Sinha had claimed that given a passport size photograph,he could create a fake licence within a span of 12 hours. If Sinha’s confession that he has been doing this for the past 10 years is to be believed,then the number of fake licences could be more,” he said.

Meanwhile,the police have initiated stringent checking of licences of rickshaw and taxi drivers in some parts of the city.