Transporters get until Dec 16 to register public vehicles under company model

Kathmandu, December 9

The Department of Transport Management has said public vehicles that have not been registered with the department under the company model will not be allowed to ply the roads from December 16.

DoTM had earlier set the deadline of mid-December for transport bodies (transport committees and associations) to register as ‘company’ and get their vehicle registration renewed from the department. However, DoTM today issued a notice informing transport bodies that their vehicles would be banned from the date stated in the notice if they failed to change into the company model.

As per DoTM statistics, there are more than 200,000 public vehicles, including passenger and goods-carrying vehicles across the country. However, only 6,000 such vehicles (of the 1,500 transport bodies) have registered with the DoTM under the company model so far.

If DoTM implements this decision, a huge number of public vehicles will not be allowed to ply the country’s roads from December 16.

“We have repeatedly directed transport bodies to transform themselves into companies and register their vehicles with the DoTM. However, a large number of public vehicles have not registered under the company modality,” informed Gokarna Upadhyay, spokesperson for DoTM.

Upadhyay, however,  said most public vehicles would be registered under the company model by next week as transport bodies were increasingly registering themselves with the Office of the Company Registrar.

Though the government was supposed to scrap all transport bodies (transport committees and associations) from mid-July if they did not switch to the company model by then, the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport today extended the deadline for transport bodies to comply with the aforementioned law.

The government has been acting tough against transport syndicates since April by issuing vehicle route permits to new transport companies. It is preparing to scrap all transport committees and associations. The move was intended not only to end the monopoly of transporters in the public transportation sector and ensure the sector’s healthy growth, but also to bring Nepal’s public transport sector, which makes transactions worth billions of rupees annually, under the income tax net of the government.

However, a few big transport associations are yet to start the company registration process and are still lobbying for rebirth of the syndicate system. Transport entrepreneurs are reluctant to comment on the issue.