Road transport ministry may link Aadhar data and driving licence to track unsafe drivers

MUMBAI|NEW DELHI: The road transport ministry is looking at linking driving licence and Aadhaar data, expecting it to help better track unsafe drivers and weed out those with multiple licences in the latest of a string of technology-based initiatives it has undertaken.

Nitin Gadkari, the minister for road, transport, highways and shipping, has said the government would look to cut the number of road accident fatalities in India by half in the next two years. India records more deaths in road accidents than any other country — on average about 1.5 lakh people die in road accidents in the country, many of them due to reckless and drunken driving. In the absence of an effective tracking mechanism, even habitual offenders dodge penalty and return to roads, often making fresh driving licences. The minister has said he would look at centralising data to check violations. Linking driving licence information with biometric data collected by the Unique Identification Authority of India for Aadhaar could help track offenders more effectively.

“There has been thinking that UID could be one of the options to link with the driving licence. There would be central data for people who are driving — both for driver’s licences and registration. In the proposed Motor Vehicle Act, there is going to be linkage between violation and penalty,” a road transport ministry official told ET.

The official said the government was looking at collecting data, which would then be mined. He declined to comment on record because he is not authorised to talk about the project.

The government has already begun the process of centralising data. The minister of state for road transport and highways, Pon Radhakrishnan, told Parliament earlier this month that the ministry was putting together a common portal for vehicle-and-driver related services, which involves the migration of legacy and local-RTO data to a centralised platform. The ministry is in talks with analytics platform companies to see how such a linking would work.

“The ministry of transport is looking at an analytics platform to catch people with multiple licences and those who are habitually bad drivers.

They have had some initial discussions with companies that provide the analytics platforms,” said Sudipta Sen, chief executive and managing director of analytics company SAS Institute (India).

Sen added the system could even be extended to rope in insurance companies, who could then tailor premiums based on a driver’s safety record.