Pay all RTO fees online soon

The Transport department will introduce e-payment services in a few weeks so that people will not have to return to the Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) to pay fees or obtain acknowledgements for services availed.

Joint Commissioner of the Transport department, Maruti Sambrani, told Deccan Herald that e-payment will go a long way in reducing corruption and will strengthen peoples’ confidence in the RTO system. “Right now, we are testing the e-payment system. We have conducted a soft launch and going by its performance we will soon launch it on a real-time basis,” he said.

During the soft launch,180 transactions have been carried out and a revenue of over Rs 20 crore has been generated. “This gives us confidence that the system will perform according to the outlined parameters,” Sambrani added.

“People can pay any fee online, from anywhere and at any time. This is a 24/7 service that can be accessed even in the dead of night. People will not have to visit the RTO time and again,” he said.

Typically, people come to the RTO several times to pay fees for the services. The queues are long and people have to wait for over an hour. And even when it is their turn, if a document is missing in the file, they will have to come back again. The authorities want to avoid these repetitive trips to the RTO and ensure that peoples’ work gets done on time.

Rajshekhar Murthy, who has been repeatedly coming to the RTO in Rajajinagar from Belagavi said, “I have been coming here from Belagavi for the last three years in relation to a vehicle registration, but nothing is getting done. They send me back for some work or ask for another document. What can I do? I have no confidence that the work will get done. After all the document work is done, I may be stuck in long queues to pay the fee.”

Like Murthy there are several others waiting their turn to pay fees and all of them complain that things are not done quickly at the RTO. “The man who collects the fee has something or the other to point out in the documents. People are not sure if the work will get done in a day. I hope the e-payment system is introduced as soon as possible, so that we will not have to come back to stand in queues to pay the fee, after the documents are cleared,” Manjunath S said.