Vehicle registration: In Swat, old licence plates a bane for transporters

Officials say plates are legal, but transporters continue to be fined.

SWAT:

Four years after the North West Frontier Province was renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), over 150,000 locally-registered vehicles still lack new documents and licence plates. Besides the unending wait, transporters in Swat District are facing problems as they commute to other parts of the country.

While the K-P Excise and Taxation department has issued car owners temporary registrations and licence plates, they are unacceptable elsewhere in the country and traffic police impose heavy fines on all such vehicles.

Saadullah Khan, a truck driver who had come to collect new number plates for his lorry at the Excise and Taxation department, complained that he has been coming here for the past four years to get new licence plates for his truck, but the officials concerned always delay the process saying that the new plates are not available.

“The police charge anything between Rs2,000 to Rs5,000 from us for using old licence plates on our vehicles and there is nothing we can do about it,” he added helplessly.

“Ironically, besides the traffic police, the Excise and Taxation officials also impose fines on vehicles with temporary number plates,” claimed Anwar Anjum, another vehicle owner. “I don’t understand why licence plates issued by one government department are not accepted by the same department of other districts,” he added.

Anjum said that issuance of the new licence plates and registrations has been suspended since the renaming of the province and demanded of the government to either expedite the issuance of the new numbers plates or make temporary number plates acceptable elsewhere in the country.

When contacted, Excise and Taxation Registration Deputy Director Salahuddin assured that the temporary licence plates are legal, and added that imposing fine on them is “not only illegal but also condemnable”.

The deputy director said since the province was renamed a total of 152,000 new registrations have been processed, in which 5,500 new licence plates have already been issued while the rest will be issued in the coming month.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2012.