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Is your car WANTED?
Soon you will be able to log on to the Web and check. State transport commission is uploading registration numbers of vehicles involved in offences ......Nilesh Nikade
If you plan on buying a second-hand car, you might want to check its history to see whether it has any offence registered against it and has clearance to ply on the road.
There are many that don’t have the requisite permissions from the Regional Transport Office (RTO). However, since data on them is not easy to acquire such vehicles are still on the road. In a crackdown against such ‘wanted’ vehicles, the state transport commissioner has decided to upload their registration numbers on the Internet. Vehicle owners are issued a memo by the RTO if they commit any offence under the Motor Vehicles Act. They then have to go to their local RTO and clear the charges against the vehicle by paying a fine. Owners can renew the vehicle’s registration and permit only by obtaining a No Objection Certificate from the RTO. Until then, the vehicles are not allowed to ply on the roads. Till now, the RTO’s prosecution department kept manual records of cases against the vehicles. Deepak Kapoor, transport commissioner, said, “However, I observed that due to corruption, vehicle owners were able to obtain NOCs even without getting the charges against the vehicles cleared. It’s a tedious task to go through the manual records to check on cases pending against a particular vehicle and this is how many owners were able to get the vehicles’ permits renewed.” By uploading the prosecution data on the Internet, RTO officials will be able to keep a tab on vehicle owners who are repeat offenders under the Motor Vehicles Act. “We started the work at the Mumbai Central RTO on May 13 and, by June 15 the prosecution data of all the 45 RTOs in the state will be available to the public online. This way an officer in Mumbai will be able to check records of vehicles registered in Nagpur by simply logging on to our Web site, www.mahatranscom.in,” Kapoor added. What can get your car in trouble • Violation of pollution norms • Sale of a vehicle or alteration of vehicle in contravention to provisions under the Motor Vehicles Act • Not having proper registration • Load exceeding permissible limits • Not having insurance • Being broken into or having a mechanism tampered with |
