In a shift towards paperless governance, the State government has asked the Transport Department to do away with the printing of driving licences (DLs) and registration certificates (RCs) and instead embrace digitisation.
The department has started issuing DLs and RCs in digital format across the State from August 1. Under the new system, people can access their driving licence and RC documents on their cell phones through the mobile apps like DigiLocker, which is a secure cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and verification of documents and certificates, or m-Parivahan. “’The enforcement authorities like the traffic police can examine the documents in online mode. The government has also written to the neighbouring States about the development requesting them to honour the digitised format of the documents of motorists from Andhra Pradesh visiting their place,” said an official of the department.
Printouts
For people who do not use mobile phones, printouts of these digital versions would be accepted by the enforcing authorities.
The department used to collect ₹200 towards application fees and an additional ₹35 towards postal charges for physical documents. It closed the old system on July 28 and decided to issue the digital versions free of cost.
Last batch
People who have already paid for their documents in the past, however, will be given physical copies.
“The government has released ₹33 crore for printing of the pending driving licences and registration certificates and asked the department to stop printing of the cards henceforth,” said M. Purendra, Deputy Transport Commissioner, Krishna district.
The department officials say that the digital licences and RC cards will greatly benefit motorists, as they do not need to carry their physical documents any more.
Conventionally, driving licences were issued in the old book format with several pages of information. Often, with regular use, the pages of the booklet would come apart and they had to be stuck again. To make things easier, modern driving licences were issued in the form of a card that could be carried without any hassle.
The Smart Card Driving Licence (SCDL), used in the past, was tamper-proof and had an embedded microprocessor chip which stored all the information about the licence-holder. But acute scarcity of smart cards due to a reported shortage of semiconductors globally prompted the department officials to explore the feasibility of switching to QR code-based driving licences.
The digitisation of the driving licence and RC is good news for motorists who have endured a long wait to get their documents.
