Kathmandu, July 9:

Soon people in Nepal will be possessing smart card-like driving licences instead of the paper ones issued these days, thanks to the Cabinet decision on June 26.

The Department of Transport Management (DoTM) received a copy of the decision on July 6.

“This is a great achievement,” commented Khagendra Mani Pokhrel, director general of DoTM. He said the department would very soon begin work to go high-tech.

“If everything goes as planned, electronic driving licences would replace the existing paper cards after six months,” he said.

The Ministry of Labour and Transport Management had been repeatedly returning the DoTM proposal to replace paper driving licences with electronic ones, but now the government has given us the green light, Pokhrel said.

Director of DoTM, Jeevan Sedhain, said the department has begun work for managing the necessary budget and the procedure to replace the existing paper licences with smart cards.

“We will go for the most recent and latest technology in the field,” he said.

Some two years ago, the then DoTM technical director Sharad Adhikary had introduced the idea of issuing electronic licence cards and had proposed to the government for the new system.