KOCHI: Non-payment of fines imposed for a traffic violation will land a vehicle owner in trouble with the Motor Vehicles Department (MVD) planning to ‘blacklist’ the erring vehicles. Once the department starts implementing the rule strictly, the vehicle owner will be denied service from all regional transport offices across the nation.
Key services including ownership transfer, registration renewal, address change in the registration certificate, issuing of pollution certificate will be denied.
The blacklisting, which will be done through the recently launched Vahan software, comes after the government suffered huge revenue loss due to non-payment of fines.
“People are not at all bothered about the memos or check report which they receive in their registered address. They know they’ve to take their vehicle to the MVD only for the next RC renewal. As per the department’s rule, private vehicles have to undergo compulsory fitness test only 15 years after purchasing the vehicle.
Vehicles which haven’t paid arrears have been receiving service from the department. But by blacklisting the vehicles, the owners will be denied service across the nation until they clear their arrears. Even for getting a pollution certificate, the violators will be forced to clear the amount,” said Joint Transport Commissioner Rajeev Puthalath.
As per the past six years’ statistics available with the department, over 9,18,058 motorists have ignored the fine issued against memos by the MVD. This alone cost the department a revenue loss of Rs 43.39 crore.
“On average, the department detected three lakh offences monthly. But a large number of them are ignoring the memos we’ve served. The only option available is to initiate prosecution steps against the offenders. But their big number makes it impractical for the court to take prosecution steps. Moreover, the High Court directed the MVD to take stringent measures against motor vehicle violations. Based on that, we decided to blacklist the vehicles,” said Rajeev.
Meanwhile, the department has started transferring the database of vehicles from the currently used smart move application to Vahan software.
“The data of vehicles with registration number from 1 to 2000 have already been transferred. The remaining will be done this week. The vehicles that have arrears will be marked as blacklisted. This is aimed at implementing digitalisation of enforcement activity in the state and thereby reducing the number of accidents,” said Transport Commissioner R Sreelekha.
The official also opined the new system is already implemented in other states.
“The entire system will be transferred to the new software by March. After that, the offenders will find it tough to flee from the clutches of MVD,” added Sreelekha.