Delayed deliveries : Pindi drivers await licences

An official says there is only one printer in Lahore, where all licenses are printed

RAWALPINDI:

As many as 6, 000 applicants await delivery of their driving licenses in Rawalpindi for the last two to three months, owing to the centralised online processing system becoming a headache for the traffic police, The Express Tribune has learnt.

An official in the office of the City Traffic Police said the Driving License Issuance Management System (DLIMS), initiated in October 2015, had slowed the process of obtaining licenses.

The centralised system was envisioned to streamline the licence process in 36 districts of Punjab, the official said.

The official, requesting anonymity, said there was only one printer in Lahore, where all driving licenses were printed. Further, he said the licenses were delivered then to applicants via private courier service.

The official noted that the entries for licenses were made from all 36 districts simultaneously, overloading the system, which often remains down for many hours a day. This, he said, was slowing the process and causing long queues outside the traffic office.

“I reached outside the traffic office at 6am, and wanted to be first in queue, which is usually formed by 8am, when the office opens,” said Naeem Satti, who came from as far as Kotli Sattian to obtain his light transport vehicle license.

Satti said that he was lucky that his data was collected by the traffic officers and uploaded before 9am. He said it was routine for the online system to be down after 10am.

“Once you succeed in completing the process for uploading data, passing the driving and traffic rules test, applicants have to wait for delivery of the license for a long time,” said Majid Mughal, who had been waiting for his motorcar license for 20 days.

He added that he had been told that his licence was going to be delivered to him in three days, and said he checked the online status of his licence, and that it had yet to be printed. He added that traffic officers had told him that if the license was not delivered, a courier service would drop the document at the traffic office.

The Express Tribune has learnt that the Punjab IT Board had prepared the online centralised processing system for the traffic police. OCS, a private courier company, had been given contract for delivering the licenses across the province.

When contacted, CTO Khurram Shahzad Janbaz confirmed that a lot of driving licenses were pending. In response to a question on the online system, the CTO said that the system was slow and overloaded.

When asked what suggestions he had made to the Punjab government for improving the system, CTO Janbaz said that the complaints had come from all districts, and added that the government had installed a second printer, which will start printing licenses in March.

He said that the government had started giving priority to applicants from five metro cities: Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Faisalabad and Multan.

He added that the applicants had to pay Rs280 for delivery of the license at their address. He said that he had written a letter to the authorities in Punjab, asking the courier company to further improve its delivery system.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 22^nd,  2016.