KOCHI: Driving tests in the Ernakulam district are set to resume from Thursday after a gap of nearly two weeks, with a section of protesting driving school owners agreeing to temporarily withdraw from their non-cooperation strike.
“A meeting of various unions held on Tuesday agreed to temporarily facilitate the tests from Thursday. We’ll start bringing candidates for the tests from the day,” said T P Baiju, vice-president, All Kerala Driving School Workers Unions (CITU).
The proposal to resume the tests has come from the CITU, which has temporarily withdrawn from the strike.
“The joint forum of organisations is actively considering the same since we don’t want to further prolong the difficulty faced by the hundreds of candidates,” said Arun Kumar, regional secretary, All Kerala Motor Driving School Instructors and Workers Association.
Though the MVD is conducting driving tests for individual candidates appearing directly without the help of any driving schools, only a handful of such candidates are appearing for the tests.
Around 10,000 applicants are yet to get a test date in the Ernakulam region alone, while nearly 10 lakh applications are pending across the state. On Monday, the joint forum took out a protest march to the secretariat, demanding that the government return to the old format of driving tests.
While the transport department diluted some of the new driving test rules introduced on May 1, the various unions want solutions mainly on two matters – the number of driving tests that can be held daily and the changed format of road test and ground tests.
As per the new rules, only 40 driving tests can be held daily instead of the earlier number of 120, which the driving schools term as “grossly inadequate” in the wake of the huge backlog of applications.