KARACHI: The Sindh police have started registering their vehicles “probably for the first time in their history” and in the process more than 8,500 units of their fleet have become part of the provincial motor vehicle registration department’s record as the law-enforcement agency is no longer using the “illegal vehicles”, it emerged on Saturday.

The major move after a consistent campaign from a segment of civil society and due to “reforms initiative” from the top in the Sindh police has led to the start of the process as before the recent development, the law-enforcement agency had hardly any vehicle in its fleet registered with the Sindh excise and taxation department.

“Till a year or more ago, the Sindh police were a major defaulter of motor vehicle tax, owing Rs12.52 million to the department,” said a source. “Not only this, they also did not use official registration number plates from the excise department, and marked their vehicles just with the number of SP [Sindh Police] on their own, which was absolutely illegal.”

He said there was no record of Sindh police vehicles in the excise department and even the cars in personal use of the officers were not officially registered. That was a strange practice as the institution, which was supposed to enforce the law, was itself violating the law by using the vehicles, which did not have registration documents and number plates.

The situation started changing more than a year ago as the latest figures suggested the Sindh police and the provincial excise and taxation department took initiative to fix the issue, bringing the vehicles in the LEA’s fleet into the registration net.

“After that initiative we have registered more than 8,500 Sindh police vehicles over the past several months,” said Mohammad Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Director General of the Sindh Excise and Taxation Department. “Of them around 3,500 are motorbikes which are purely used for regular policing and the rest are other vehicles which include cars and mobile vans.”

It’s an ongoing process, he said, which would continue to ensure registration of all vehicles being used by the LEAs and other government departments.

The registration of such a huge number of vehicles being used by the Sindh police would also help achieve the revenue target set by the provincial government. The Sindh government’s tax collection soared by 23.7 per cent to Rs43.8 billion during the last financial year compared to Rs35.4bn of 2014-15.

The officials said that though the number of unregistered vehicles being used by the Sindh police was much higher, there were several provincial government departments which had been employing this practice for the past several years.

“A study carried out by a group of Karachiites named the Citizens Trust Against Crime with the assistance of the Sindh police, traffic authorities and the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee identified around two years ago that more than 5,000 vehicles being used by various departments of the Sindh government, including police, were not registered with the excise and taxation department, which is not only a stark violation of the relevant laws but also poses security threats,” said another official.

Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2017