Digital drive: Soon you won't need to carry original driving licence, RC, insurance

Soon you would not need to carry original copies of all vehicle papers like driving licence, vehicle registration certificate, insurance, pollution certificate or the permits issued to commercial vehicles with you. According to a ToI report, the Centre plans to amend Motor Vehicles Rules to make it legal for any citizen to carry digital vehicle documents and simultaneously making it compulsory for traffic police to accept digital version of documents. This means that you would not have to carry physical papers in your vehicle as digital copies of the certificates would be valid.

To avail the facility, one has to store all the vehicle documents on the government's cloud-based service DigiLocker and when asked he/she can simply display the stored certificates on a smartphone or any other digital devices. These digital copies can be shared with other departments as identity and address proof.

This would also benefit taxi, cab, auto and truck operators as the certificates can they need multiple documents for operations and now these paper would be easily stored and accessed digitally.


Apart from this, the government has notified the draft rule on road transport in which it has proposed to make it mandatory for heavy vehicles like trucks to carry construction materials such as sand, soil and cement in a "closed body".

Besides, the government has increased the maximum load carrying capacity of heavy vehicles, including trucks, by 20-25 per cent besides scrapping the mandatory annual renewal of fitness certificates for freight carriers. Fitness certificates for trucks would now be renewed in every two years not annually.

The ministry has also proposed installation of FASTags on the front windscreens. FASTag is a device that uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for making toll payments directly from the user account.