Swapping vehicle ownership was never so easy

New system will allow buyers and sellers in Punjab to change ownership at any NADRA E-Convenience centre

LAHORE: Maybe you have sold a car or maybe you just bought a second-hand one and are now looking to change vehicle ownership. If you are in Punjab, you are in luck.

The province’s vehicle owners will no longer have to rely solely on excise offices and will be able to change vehicle ownership through the National Database and Registration Authority’s (NADRA) more than 1,800 E-Convenience centres.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, provincial officials said the new change of vehicle ownership system has been finalised after two years of effort by NADRA and the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB).  According to them, the two sides only have to hash out the issues of fees and provision of biometric scanners now.

They said the Punjab excise minister did direct top excise department officials to meet with their counterparts from NADRA and PITB in this regard, but such a meeting has not taken place so far. The officials added that the minister expressed extreme displeasure at the concerned officials’ lax attitude towards bringing the new system online.

Providing details of the new system, officials said the excise department is giving NADRA access to its vehicle ownership data so that prospective buyers and sellers of used vehicles do not necessarily have to change ownership at excise offices. The seller, they said, can simply go to any NADRA E-Convenience centre, pay a fee and change the vehicle’s ownership.

After biometric verification of the seller, NADRA will retrieve data for the vehicle in question from excise records and update it with the buyer’s name, CNIC and cellphone numbers, the officials said. Both the seller and buyer will receive a confirmation SMS following this step. The text will inform the buyer how much they have to pay to finalise the change of ownership vehicle.

Once they pay the fee, the new owner of the vehicle will receive a smart registration card at their home address within a few days. In case a buyer fails to pay the fee in 30 days, the entire procedure will have to be carried out again from scratch.

According to officials, buyers and sellers do not have to visit a NADRA centre or excise office together to change vehicle ownership. If separated by distance, they will be able to complete the transaction through NADRA’s biometric authentication facilities anywhere in the country. The two parties do not even have to be present in a NADRA facility or excise office at the same time, they added.

To ensure the system is uniformly implemented across the province, NADRA is also supplying 250 biometric scanners to the excise department. Fifty of these will be used by excise offices in Lahore, while the rest will be distributed across excise offices in each of Punjab’s districts.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, Punjab Excise Minister Hafiz Mumtaz said a final meeting between excise, NADRA and PITB officials to finalise the new system will be held in a few days. He blamed the delay in bringing the system online on the ‘negligence of some officers’, but vowed he will not tolerate any further holdups.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2019.