Smart cards soon for commercial vehicle drivers

“We have already issued the smart card licenses to both the private and commercial vehicles drivers and are working on the proposal to issue smart card registrations to commercial vehicles drivers. As of now,smart card registrations are only issued to two-wheelers and cars,” said,deputy Regional Transport Officer,SP Dhaygude. For switching over from manual registration certificates to smart cards,officials said that they have already started the trial run of the software developed by the NIC for the project.

“We have a software for the smart card licenses. But since the road tax collection is not one time,but is made on yearly basis by the commercial drivers so we require a different software for the registration certificates. We started the trial run of the software,Vihan,developed by NIC to issue smart cards registration certificates to commercial vehicles,but found the software was not giving the correct results of the road tax slab,” said an RTO official. However,Kharatmal said that the smart cards which are being issued to the commercial vehicles will come handy for the drivers.

“There is no need to carry a bunch of documents by the commercial tax drivers,”said the RTO. Besides,the details of road tax collections,these smart cards will also store a wide range of information about the vehicle. They will bear the details about the month and year of production of the vehicle,its make,seating capacity,engine no,chasis no and makers number and even whether the vehicle was drawn on loan. “We already have smart card readers available with us to read the smart cards and once the software is modified,we will switch over to smart card registrations for the transport vehicles,” said Dhaygude.