Driving licence issuance | An exasperating test of patience Premium

Motorists are put through nearly year-long wait to get their driving licences due to shortage of QR code cards at the RTOs across Andhra Pradesh

S. Kanaka Raju applied for a driving licence (DL) in April last year. It’s been more than eight months and he, along with scores of other motorists, has been suffering the exasperating delay in the issuance of their DLs, registration certificates (RC) or renewed documents. The Regional Transport Offices (RTO) across the State, however, cite the shortage of cards for the lengthy wait.

“I have cleared the driving test, all the mandatory checks of my vehicle, and I also paid the requisite fee months ago. I was given a temporary paper document by the department staff who said that the cards were in short supply and asked me to wait for some time,” says the resident of Ashok Nagar in Vijayawada.

Amidst reports of the scarcity of smart cards due to a shortage of semiconductors globally, it is learnt that the State Transport Department has decided to migrate from chip-based smart cards to QR code-based driving licences. “After discussing the issue thoroughly, we are contemplating doing away with the chip-based smart cards and opt QR code-based driving licences,” said a senior official of the Transport Department.

A four-member committee constituting members from the Department held several rounds of talks before arriving at the decision, said the official, informing that fresh tenders would be called for the QR code-based cards.

Admitting the 8-9 months of backlog, the official said each month, on average, around 2 lakh cards are issued. “We should be able to start the process by March,” he said.

Applicants from across the State are in the same boat with the pending DL and RC cards increasing by the day. For instance, in the NTR district alone, there is a pendency of around 60,000 cards. “We have not been able to issue DL and RC cards since March 2022 because of non-availability of cards,” said Deputy Transport Commissioner M. Purendra.

The cards issued earlier, the Smart Card Driving Licence (SCDL) is tamper-proof and has an embedded microprocessor chip which stores all the information about the licence-holder. Not all States in the country have adopted this smart card driving licence but it is considered by many to be much better than the chip-based driving licence as the former holds all the information about the licence-holder.