Nearly Half the Drivers are Unlicensed With Driving School Racketeers Making a Killing

No mechanism for road safety will work if you don’t have sensible drivers who have undergone proper and professional training.
Nearly Half the Drivers are Unlicensed With  Driving School Racketeers Making  a Killing

No mechanism for road safety will work if you don’t have sensible drivers who have undergone proper and professional training. For that, the transport department passed a government order setting basic benchmarks for driving schools five years ago.

The requirements broadly include having professionally trained driving coaches and adequate infrastructure to train the learners. Driving school owners baulked at the idea and filed a suit against the order in the Madras High Court. Three years later in 2010, the court upheld the validity of the order.

However, years after the court verdict and lapse of grace period offered by the transport department, many driving schools have not bothered to comply with the government norms.

“There are a few schools in the State that systematically teach driving. But many schools aren’t as sincere. They just have one room from which they operate with no facility on the ground. Their professional trainers are only on paper. Getting a licence through driving schools has become a racket,” says transport expert Dr N S Srinivasan.

A little number crunching will show the callousness of these driving institutes. In 2012-13, nearly 17.23 lakh new vehicles were registered by the State transport authority.

If one were to go by the ratio of drivers to vehicles as 1.5:1 – specified in the government order - at least 20 lakh new driving licences should have been issued during the same period. But, in contrast, only 9.5 lakh new licences were issued.

In other words, nearly half the drivers on our roads are unlicensed, which will explain why 98 per cent of road accidents occur due to the driver’s fault.

The driver-vehicle ratio has been skewed for the last 10 years. While issuing the government order in 2007, then transport commissioner C P Singh flagged that concern.

“Our country is notorious for granting driving licences without conducting driving tests. It is common knowledge that rules relating to granting of licences are given mere lip service. In a particular RTO where I visited, there is a photocopying shop on the premises and one has to just pay about `150, fill in the forms and get a seal from a driving school to get the license,” says advocate Sudha Ramalingam. Activists agree that the transport department has a policy of giving preference to those who apply through driving schools to encourage new learners to join that particular school. This, activists say, has resulted in sprouting of ‘stamp pad driving schools’. Proper regulation of these schools is yet to be done.

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