To ensure road safety, the Transport Department has tried several ways to find a solution to the nagging problem of unskilled and unlicensed persons such as cleaners being allowed to drive heavy vehicles on roads, but there seems to be no respite so far.
Finally, the department has decided to make effective use of the Internet to find a way out by asking training schools to get user IDs and display the list of their enrolled trainee drivers on the department’s website www.aptransport.org. For ensuring compliance in this respect, the officials conducted raids and cancelled permissions for nearly 40 private driving schools across the State, including two in Krishna district, for failing to run in a proper manner.
Rules flouted
Heavy vehicle driving licences are to be issued only after a minimum of 30 days of proper training in the tracks of approved training schools. However, many schools do not follow this rule and instead help untrained persons get licences. This is because of the unwillingness of poor cleaners and prospective drivers to lose a month’s wages. Due to poverty, they usually follow the earn-while-you-learn concept while they go as cleaners (assistants to regular drivers) in heavy vehicles for long-distance journeys.
To regulate heavy vehicle driving for better road safety, Transport Commissioner J. Raymond Peter has made it mandatory for all private training schools to register the batches of persons they are training and post those details on the department’s website. He also asked the schools to register and get a username and password.
T. Raghunath, Deputy Transport Commissioner, says that the best practices are being followed in six out of the eight training schools in Krishna district and permission is cancelled with regard to the two schools located at Jaggayyapeta and Gudivada. He says that poor persons can utilise the Rajiv Udyogasri and get free boarding and lodging besides fee waiver for heavy driving licence from the Transport Department.
The online registration of batches is expected to help monitor the attendance of trainees and ensure that they are actually trained in the schools. This is to completely eliminate the practice of some schools showing only the names of the trainees while they actually do not turn up to undergo the required training.
