Transport department in Jharkhand seems to have trapped in the system that it plans to put in place of the existing system of working manually on almost each application.

The transition from the current system of work to a computerised and sophisticated system, however, has made transporters lose their patience. The department is left with no option but to go slow on work until the change is complete.

Jharkhand Motor Federation (JMF) claims that more than 10,000 applications for national permit and renewal are pending in Jharkhand besides the frequent glitch in the Vahan-2 system and problems with the cancellation of hypothecation of vehicles.

“They do not want to work. All they want is to promote a culture of bribe. It is not about upgrading a system which is the reason for pending applications,” said State Convener of JMF US Ojha.

According to JMF, about 2000 applications for national permit and about 1000 applications for cancelling hypothecation are pending in Ranchi which includes–Ranchi, lohardaga, Khunti, Gumla, Simdega and Saraikela — and the District Transport Office of Ranchi. There are four RTAs —Ranchi, Palamu, Hazaribagh and Dumka — to dispose of applications of permits.

As part of the proposal the State Transport Authority (STA) has now delegated the power of issuing national permit to Regional Transport Authority (RTA) from July 1, 2014 and it is now not in a position to address the problem. Also, the department rubbished charges of hurdles in registration processes and payment issues since the incorporation of gateway payment system. In contrast to the accusations of JMF the department maintains that it has opened cash counters at all transport offices.

“We are no more the authority to issue national permit. From July 1 issuing permits is the sole responsibility of RTA. We have registered a higher collection figure compared to previous year so there is no question of problems related to registration or payment of taxes. Cash counters have been opened at all offices,” asserted Joint Transport Commissioner SK Sinha.

However, RTAs acknowledge that computerization has slowed the pace of operations due to mammoth task of examining the computerized record to find any discrepancies related to data entry before making the system fully operational. Sources in Transport department confided that about one-lakh pages containing details of vehicles were photocopied to tally with the details stored in computerized format.

“This is a new system. Therefore we needed to make sure that whatever record is stored in the computer matches with the record that is stored in paper form. All the documents had to come from STA.  We also want our employees to understand the system first. Nonetheless, it will become operational in next few days,” said Secretary RTA Ranchi, Raj Kumar.

Respective RTAs had to apply for a password to login into the centralized system prepared by National Informatics Centre and to some extent this is also the reason for a delayed launch of operations at RTAs, said sources.