West Bengal govt to re-issue smart cards for car registration certificates, driving licences

KOLKATA: The state transport department will resume issuing hard copies of smart driving licences and registration certificates in the plastic card format from May. Only paper printouts of the documents were being issued since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 in the absence of any licensed vendors.
A transport department official said a vendor had been registered with the public vehicles department office at Beltala and it would start issuing the smart cards in a month. The cards will have a QR code instead of embedded chips. “Keeping the documents in paper format is difficult. At present, the documents can be downloaded to DigiLocker. From May, we will issue plastic cards. Those who have the paper format can take plastic cards against a fee,” the official said.
The documents will be linked to the standardized central database, ‘Sarathi’, for driving licences, and ‘Vahan’ for registration.
The state transport department also plans to speed up the implementation of vehicle location tracking device (VLTD), which has been made mandatory for government and commercial vehicles, both passenger and goods. Following complaints from cab operators against high rates for the device by licensed vendors, the official said, the charge had been reduced following the appointment of 16 vendors. He added the rate would go down further with 25 more applications to be vetted after the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) tested the devices. “Around 12,000 VLTDs have been installed. From June, we hope to instal the device in 10,000-15,000 vehicles a month,” he said. The device will not only help the transport department’s command and control centre at Poddar Court and police control room track a vehicle involved in an offence, it will also enable quicker response to emergencies, like accidents.