Online dealer point vehicle registration launched

By our Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI, Feb 12: Standing in long queue in DTO offices while purchasing a car is passé now. One can now get his/her newly bought car registered in the showroom itself.

State Transport Minister Chandra Mohan Patowary today launched the ‘Online Dealer Point Vehicle Registration System’ at a function held at Betkuchi, Guwahati. The programme was organized by the State Department of Transport, tiol Informatics Centre (NIC) and the North East Automobile Dealers’ Association (NEADA).

The launch of the Online Dealer Point Vehicle Registration System is another significant step of the Department of Transport, to facilitate and empower the citizens of the State through the application of state-of-the-art Information and Communication Technology, in keeping with the vision of Digital India.

Speaking on the occasion as the chief guest, Patowary said: “If we dream alone, it is only a dream; but if we dream together, it becomes a reality.”

The minister hoped that the reforms with the introduction of the new online registration system will benefit the government, dealers, customers and others. He said that the system will reduce movement of physical files and will accord better monitoring at all levels, both in the Transport Department and at the Dealerships.

The Department of Transport, in association with NIC, has already implemented the application in five selected dealerships under DTO Kamrup (Metro). The minister added that all dealers in Guwahati city and across Assam will be brought under this online dealer point registration system by March and July, 2017 respectively. Patowary later distributed 11 PoS machines to officers of Transport Department for conducting cashless transactions in their offices concerned.  

The Online Dealer Point Vehicle Registration System is a web-based application developed by NIC to eble vehicle buyers to have their vehicles registered from the dealer location itself without having to visit the District Transport Office. All required payments for the registration process are made online through SBI’s online payment gateway SBI ePay. The registration number of the vehicle is assigned at the dealer location out of a list of system generated numbers. The buyer gets an authorized receipt and disclaimer with the registration mark at the dealership itself. However, the registration process is completed only after due online approval by the DTO concerned.

Once the dealer registers the vehicle and assigns it a registration mark, the data is made available for online access by the DTO concerned. The DTO verifies the record and approves it if everything is found to be in order. Required documents are sent in a physical file from the dealership to the DTO concerned so that the DTO is able to verify them physically. Once the DTO approves the record, required digital data is made available for access and download by the High Security Registration Plate (HSRP) fitment firm and the agency that is responsible for printing of the Registration Certificate in smartcard form. The HSRP can be fitted either at the DTO or sent to the dealership and fitted there only so that the buyer does not have to move out of the dealership. The smartcard RC is collected by the dealer and handed over to the buyer at the dealership.

Patowary said: “Over the years there had been a market in the DTO office in the me of registration of cars. With the launch of the Online Dealer Point Vehicle Registration System, the market has come to its dead end. Now on, driving licenses will be sent to the home addresses of the applicants by post, as is the case with passport. An applicant, however, has to go once to the DTO office for clicking the photograph.”

Commissioner and Secretary of Transport Department Ahutosh Agnihotri said, “The online system will usher in a new IT-ebled mechanism which will fasten service delivery in the government and turn the entire process convenient and transparent. It will also reduce the load and footfalls at the DTO offices.”

“The dealers will become the front-end force of the customers and vehicle owners. Since the data entry would be done at the dealership itself, it will ensure more accuracy, and reduce the data entry load on the overtaxed DTO staff,” Agnihotri added.

State Informatics Officer (SIO) of NIC, Deepak Goswami said, ‘The introduction of the ‘Homologation’ feature is distinctive because it automatically populates all vehicle details from the manufacturer database once the chassis number of the vehicle is entered.” He further elaborated that processes in all the DTOs of Assam had been computerized by the implementation of the standard tiol application software Vahan 2.0 and Sarathi 1.0. These software applications were earlier not web-ebled and ran on local distributed servers. In the last six months, the Assam Transport Department has successfully migrated to online, cloud based, web-ebled versions of these applications - Vahan 4.0 and Sarathi 4.0 in 10 DTOs. The remaining DTOs are also being lined up for migration.  Commissioner (Transport) Puru Gupta, General Mager of SBI NE Circle, Om Prakash Mishra and NEADA’s president Ujjwal Goswami and its secretary Rahul Dev Sharma and office-bearers of the Association were also present in the launch event.