Driving Licence renewal only via online

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways Deputy Secretary, Ramandeep Chowdhary has sent a directive to principal secretaries and transport commissioners of all States to discontinue the old process of verification in manual mode and follow the online verification of the driving licences for facilitation of the citizens. 

The move comes in the wake of citizens facing inconvenience to travel to their native places for procuring the NOC and sometimes seek the help of agents to procure it.

The new rule has already come into effect promising to provide relief from the conventional processes involved in the renewal of licence.

It was brought to the notice of the Ministry that many States were still sticking to the practice of obtaining NOC from the parent authority for renewals and change of address of the driving licence which not only caused disparity in the implementation process but has a potential of undue harassment to the applicant.

In case, when a user moves from one place or State which does not issue NOC to



another place or State that requires an NOC, the applications are rejected due to the lack of such documents, according to a directive issued to Transport department officials.

With current version of Sarathi, wherein all driving licences are issued following a IT based application system and the details are verifiable from the database in an online mode, there was no need for seeking an NOC for verification of such details as per the provisions of the aforesaid Act or Rules.

Sarathi database contains the information of the driving licences issued by the States and accordingly, it was advised that whenever an application for renewal or transfer is received, authority concerned can check the particulars online available in the database.

District Transport Officer (Medchal), Srinivas Puppala said that NOC used to be mandatory to curb bogus licences, but with Sarathi portal containing data of all the driving licences, the new process made licence renewal convenient for both officials and citizens.