One-nation one-DL project hits a road bump

The Centre’s one-nation-one driving licence (DL) project, aimed at fixing the prevailing issues in the machine-reading of the smartcards, has hit a bump in the road as the National Informatics Centre (NIC) is yet to iron out the technical wrinkles.

Officials in the Transport Department said the existing smartcard DLs, with an embedded integrated circuit similar to the sim card, have not been able to ease the process by officials, in obtaining a driver’s antecedents.

“Neither the traffic police nor the RTO inspectors have the machines that can read the integrated circuit in the smartcards. The one-nation-one-card DL will have QR codes which can be read with a smartphone by scanning the code,” Transport Commissioner N Shivakumar said.

The QR code will provide complete information about a driver’s antecedents, helping officials to enforce the stringent rules of the amended Motor Vehicles Act.

The commissioner said the plan to introduce the new DLs from October 1 has been delayed due to last-minute technical issues. “The NIC is fixing some of the issues that have cropped up in the last minute. Our department has made the necessary arrangements with the company, supplying the smartcards for change in the design,” he said.

As many as 16,000 to 18,000 smartcard DLs are printed in Karnataka per month. The state transport department held a meeting in September to discuss the issues. Officials told the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways that the state RTOs were ready to print the new DLs from October 1.

Other issues

“The NIC is working on two issues. First, there is the proposal that the new cards should have state language besides English, which requires several adjustments with font size considering the difference in scripts. Secondly, it has to address issues raised by the state governments,” a senior official said, adding that it may take a month or two before the new DLs become a reality.