Transport department flayed for not computerizing data

October 25, 2013

TNN |

PANAJI: The transport department has been hauled up for its failure to complete the work of creating a computerized state and national register as per the provision of Section 63 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988.

In its report up to March 2011-12, the comptroller and auditor general of India (CAG) has pointed out deficiencies in implementing Vahan and Sarathi, two softwares for various facilities, ranging from registration and taxation to issue of permits and driving licences.

Each state is expected to maintain a register of motor vehicles, containing all details, registration mark and year of manufacture. The state register (SR) was to be created in the database of Vahan software, as per data structure and standards provided by ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH).

The applicant servers and the database servers were to be accessed by the concerned clients and data entries made by them were to be captured and replicated in the server.

The data from SR was to be converted and transferred to the national register (NR). But out of 9,26,537 vehicles, only 1,92,771 vehicles were taken to Vahan database. The rest of the 7,33,766 vehicles remained out of access through NR to other stakeholders. This was due to non-porting of data by the implementing agency, and defeated the purpose of computerization, the CAG noted.

The department website “goatransport.gov.in” has not been updated since June 2011. It was also not linked to Vahan/Sarathi to provide information to the public.

The department had adopted the two softwares, Vahan and Sarathi, developed by national informatics centre (NIC) for computerization of its activities, to switch over from two earlier web base systems called e-RTA and e-Transport.

E-RTA provided the facility of registration and taxation while e-transport provided facility of cash collection, challan generation, prosecution and issue of permits by state transport authority and regional transport authority.

CAG observed that Vahan was not programmed to allot registration numbers of vehicles in a sequential order. Computerization of check posts was not done and the department was still working with e-transport, which was not integrated with Vahan. The report has pointed out several other deficiencies and suggested remedial measures.

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