New vehicles may reach buyers sooner with Bengaluru's RTO's online payment project

BENGALURU: If transport department's pilot online payment project taken up at the software hub of Electronic City turns out to be a success, the waiting period for buyers of new vehicles may significantly reduce. Currently , the waiting period for delivery of a vehicle takes between three days to one week for payment of road taxes and other registration procedures, and this will cut to a day once the new system kicks in.

Waking up rather late, the Transport department has put together an epayment portal that is currently being tested at the RTO office in Electronic City . As many as 87 transactions for registration of two and four wheelers have been successful, with Rs 32.58 lakh lifetime road taxes remitted. The transport de partment plans to extend the facility to Jayanagar, Koramangala and Indiranagar RTOs only after it makes sure it is free of glitches. "We want to put in place a system that is as seamless as booking railway tickets," Joint Transport Commissioner (eGovernance) Maruti Sambrani said. "The existing process is quite cumbersome. One has to make a DD, get it countersigned, visit the bank and so on. The online transaction takes just about a minute or two," said D S Ravindran, Secretary (Khajane 2) at the Finance department who is coordinating the efforts.

"Registering new vehicles is quite time-consuming as it involves physical visits to banks and the transport department. Because of these procedures, we are unable to meet the delivery schedule sometimes," said M P Shyam, MD at Akshaya Motors, a Mercedes-benz dealer.

SRS Travels founder KT Rajashekar said the epayment of taxes will make life easy for transporters like him, and also plug leaks for the government ."Demand drafts could be flexible, and can be misused citing any vehicle number," he said.