It seems that the excise department has finally realised the potential of modern-age technology and has decided to seek its benefits by getting rid of manual procedure for vehicle ownership transfer as well as new vehicle registration. Nonetheless, I have tried to explain the scenario in four points, which will be able to shed some light on this new development.
1: What exactly is this new system?
The basic idea behind this new system is to centralize all the registration data of cars in the country and to provide an easily understandable and implementable system to replace the old Open Letter System.
2: Why is there such a need to replace the Open Letter System?
There are two primary reasons
- Open Letter is a manual system, which involves a significant amount of manual labor to process applications and is a very tedious process.
- Since it’s a manual system and largely hard-bonded, there are lots of ambiguities and liabilities in it. The Excise department has taken notice of ‘Agent Mafia’ and is therefore actively seeking to implement an accountable system to tackle the issues of forgeries and scams.
3: When and Where?
Experts remark that this system will be run on trial basis in Punjab (initially) partly because of it’s bigger sample (population) set and partly because of (somewhat) streamlined operation, as compared to the other provinces. According to Additional D.G Excise Chauhdry Masod-u-Haq, the department is trying to introduce this system before June 2017 in Punjab.
4: How is it going to work?
This idea of smart vehicle registration includes a vehicle’s smart registration book (card), universal number and registration plate; giving commuters a much needed break from taking care of vehicles’ papers.
There are still some question marks on how is the used car transfer going to work? Or what about the already registered vehicles? And how exactly is department going to start executing this smart vehicle registration system? Nevertheless, it is being expected that the Excise Department will be launching different campaigns to educate people about this system, which will yield a goodwill from the public.
