Coming soon for traffic cops: Licence,registration verification through SMS

Traffic policemen across the country will soon be able to check the authenticity of driving licences and vehicle registration records

Traffic policemen across the country will soon be able to check the authenticity of driving licences and vehicle registration records produced to them by simply sending an SMS to the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

The NIC,which is in the process of digitising all vehicle registrations and driving licences available in the country,has called in a tender to select the vendor to manage the SMS service.

A source in the know said any state government can register mobile numbers of their policemen at a rate of Rs 5 per number. According to the plan,the SMS sent to NIC by the policemen will be free of cost, he said.

With this facility available for policemen,any attempt of providing false driving licence or vehicle registration papers to the law enforcement official at a traffic intersection is unlikely to pass muster. This move is also being projected as an alternative to providing expensive chip-reading machine to the policemen.

The states have started issuing registrations documents and driving licences in the form of a smart card that has a chip installed in it,which can be decoded through a chip reading machine. However,the effectiveness of this facility is limited as the NIC has not been able to digitise all the driving licence and registration records till now.

Around 40 million of the total 100 million driving licences have been digitised and around 110 million of the total 160 million vehicle registration certificates have been digitised.

The limitations on the account of digitisation of legacy data being incomplete is accepted by officials too. In the case of that particular document not being digitised,the traffic police will get a not available message. But the NIC,along with the state governments,is working on quickly digitising the old data, he said.

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The deadline for digitising all the data is March 2015,whereas a few states have assured the Road Transport Ministry that they will be able to complete it by the end of the current calendar year.

Gujarat,Puducherry,Punjab and Meghalaya assured the Road Transport Ministry,during a national workshop on computerisation in transport sector held in New Delhi on Tuesday,that they will be able to complete the digitisation process before the end of 2013.

A number of other states have also assured to complete the digitisation process during 2014.