PESHAWAR, Nov 14: The provincial excise and taxation department will soon introduce a new motor vehicle registration system aimed at ensuring transparency. The work will be fully computerized. Under the plan, imported motor registration number plates and machine-readable vehicle registration books will be introduced.
Giving details at a press conference here on Monday, senior officials of the directorate of excise and taxation (E&T) said that initially the system would be introduced in Peshawar district from Nov 21.
Subsequently, the other 23 districts of the province will be brought under the system by linking the district-based excise department’s units through a computerized network.
The new system, said Nasir Khan, deputy director E&T, envisaged introduction of imported computerized vehicle registration number plates, issuance of passport-style, machine-readable computerized registration books, establishment of computerized databank of registered vehicles for which a special software had been developed.
The system entails introduction of new procedures under which owners of vehicles would be handed over the original file containing documents of their vehicles - as is being done in Lahore and Karachi.
The provincial government, said Mr Khan, had entered into an agreement on April 12, 2005, with a Germany-based company - EHA Hoffmann GmbH - which would provide imported computerized registration number plates and help the directorate develop new machine-readable computerized motor registration books and develop databank of registered vehicles by linking district-based units of the E & T directorate with the main directorate in Peshawar through computer network.
The director general E&T, Abdul Jalil, and German company’s representative in Pakistan Abid Ibrar were also present at the press conference.
Mr Khan expressed the hope that the new system would help ensure transparency in the motor vehicle registration system.
“Recordkeeping has been our grey area and by evolving new mechanism we would be able to ensure transparency,” said Mr Khan.
With the introduction of the new system, he added, owners of vehicles would start getting computerized motor registration numbers from April 21 - after a gap of three years.
The system of computerized number plates had originally been introduced in the province during the days of the last PML-N government. However, the government subsequently terminated the contract “after it did not fulfil the conditions of the agreement and provided substandard registration number plates”.