Queuing up in front the counters of the Road Transport Offices to remit various fees is set to become a thing of the past with the State Motor Vehicles Department (MVD) gearing up to introduce e-payment facility as part of streamlining its delivery of services.
The proposal is awaiting the nod of the Finance Ministry. “We are ready to launch the facility the moment the government grants sanction,” highly placed sources in the department told The Hindu . Once the government gives the approval, a trial run will be conducted before activating the link given in the website of the department.
The ground work including the integration of the servers of the participating banks, treasury and the Motor Vehicles Department has been completed with the assistance of the National Informatics Centre. As per the arrangement, once a citizen remits online the amount for a particular service and the treasury department sends an acknowledgment of its receipt to the Motor Vehicles Department, the designated department officials will stamp digital signatures, completing the delivery of the service. Initially, the e-payment facility will be restricted to a limited number of services. Gradually, all 24 services of the Motor Vehicles Department will be brought under the e-payment net, sources said.
Internet-driven
The Internet-driven system will help citizens to save a considerable amount of time. For instance, vehicle owners in need of the fitness certificate for their vehicles can pay the required fees online and bring the vehicles straight for inspection of the authorities instead of waiting in a queue to remit the fees before the inspection.
On the flip side, the facility can be availed of by only those customers who have accounts either with the State Bank of India or State Bank of Travancore as the State treasury does not approve online transactions with any other bank. To overcome this limitation, the government will have to make arrangements recognising payments made from any bank as done by the Railways for its online reservation. The government, it is learnt, is working in association with the Kerala IT Mission to explore this possibility.
Already, application for services of the Motor Vehicles Department can be submitted online. Last week, Akshaya Mission was made a partner in rendering the services online with the aim of enabling even the not-so-Internet-savvy customers to benefit from the facility.
The exhaustive data base with the Motor Vehicles Department means that except in cases like registering a new vehicle or applying for a fresh licence, the filling-in of online applications is relatively easy. On entering the licence or vehicle number, the requisite fields in the application get filled automatically.
