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Outdated Software Upsets Transport Department

By Nishant, Section News
Posted on Tue Sep 30, 2008 at 03:56:13 AM EST

If you are about to receive a new driving licence, or waiting for the renewal of your old one, don't be surprised if you find errors in them.

Thanks to the use of outdated software, the state transport department has been churning out driving licences fraught with errors.

Non-availability of appropriate software has forced the state transport department to use software like Vahan and Sarathi in its regional transport offices (RTO) which has led to incorrect information about applicants being printed in their driving licences. Vahan and Sarathi, the two application software programmes developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC), were supposed to provide an automatic system to issue driving licence to applicants and vehicle registration numbers. Both programmes were installed in the RTO at Sarat Bose Road a couple of years ago, but the project failed as the software programmes were often found to be incompatible with the system. Hence, they were unable to provide correct data.

In one such instance, a member of the Bengal Taxi Association who was supposed to receive his driving licence found that both the issuance date of his driving licence and its expiry date were the same.
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An RTO official, Kolkata, said: "Both Vahan and Sarathi were not at all user-friendly and took too much time to execute an operation. In many cases the installed software gave an incorrect output. Often details of one applicant was inter-changed with another."

He further added that most of the work had to be done manually with the software failing to be up to the mark. Moreover, the state government has been forced to install this "faulty" software at RTOs in districts like Howrah, Burdwan and Hooghly owing to non-availability of an alternative software.

When contacted Mr Rathindranath Roychowdhury, vice-chairman, Regional Transport Authority Board, Kolkata, said there are sufficient computers in their offices and even though officials are well-trained, they face difficulty in handling this faulty software. He further added: "Not only officials, applicants too have experienced trouble because of the software. NIC officials should take steps to overcome the problems."

Source: The Statesman News service 30/Sep/2008

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