Kathmandu, August 27

Starting November, the Department of Transport Management (DoTM) will provide smart licences to service-seekers within a week.

At a time when service-seekers have been widely criticising the government for its inability to provide smart licences in a timely manner for over two years, the DoTM has finally acquired a ‘mass printer’ to ease the process of printing the smart driving licences and providing them on time to service-seekers.

Gogan Bahadur Hamal, director general of DoTM, said that in the first phase, the department will provide the smart licences to nearly 400,000 service-seekers who have already submitted their applications for renewal of their licences and those who have passed their vehicle trial. These service-seekers have been waiting for over a year to receive their licences.

The department plans to start printing the smart licence cards from next week.

According to Hamal, the ‘mass printer’ can print 500 driving licences per hour and service-seekers will be able to receive their smart licence cards easily after November.

As the department has not been able to issue smart driving licences in a full-fledged manner due to low capacity of printing, the department is planning to add another high capacity ‘mass printer’ that can print up to 8,000 smartcards a day and it will soon call a tender for the purpose. After receiving another mass printer, the department will be able to provide driving licence to the candidates who pass the vehicle trial test the very next day.

Before acquiring the first ‘mass printer’, DoTM had four printers with capacity to print only 1,500 driving licences per day. However, demand stands at more than 5,000 per day.

Meanwhile, DoTM has also started the process to purchase additional one million units of smartcards to ensure that the department does not face scarcity of smartcards in the future.