Over 2 lakh applicants devoid of 'smart driving licence'

LALITPUR: The Transport Management Office has so far not been able to manage smart licences for more than 200,000 people who had applied for driving licence and passed the written and trial tests.

The number of applicants who have passed the examination administered by the Transport Management Office at Ekantakuna, Lalitpur for the ‘smart card’ and also paid the fees for the same has reached 557,700 as of Thursday.

This number includes all the applicants who have passed the examination for driving license in the last four years since the Office started issuing smart driving licence.

So far 354,000 people have got smart driving licence from the Office. The Office has stated that 203,000 smart driving licences still remained to be printed.

Even those applicants who had passed the trial and paid fees one year back have not received the smart licence. They have been riding and driving vehicles producing the receipt of the revenue they had paid to the office for driving licence whenever traffic police ask them to present their licence.

It has been learned that the office is not able to print adequate number of smart driving licences as the printing machine is of a low capacity one.

Even those who have the smart driving licence have complained that the card is not of good quality as the ‘chip’ embedded in the card comes out easily and the letters pale out in short period.