ONLINE PAYMENTS FOR FANCY NUMBERS

NEW DELHI: In an attempt to bring transparency, the Delhi Transportation Department has decided to allow only e-auctioning of VVIP vehicle numbers (fancy numbers).

Under this initiative, an applicant seeking for a fancy number need not visit the department’s office, as the complete process, right from applying for the auction, will now be available only in online mode and even the payment will be received via online payments.

The initiative has been taken in the wake of recent grievances regarding the payment by demand draft. The complaints said that a few fancy number seekers offered benefits to the officials concerned.

The AAP government adopted a tough stance on this and decided to make the process online, claimed a source.

The source admitted that the bidding for fancy number begins with a bid of five lakh.

Similarly, the e-auction registration fees will be Rs 1,000 (non-refundable). The successful bidder is required to pay the remaining amount.

Before auctioning, the fancy numbers were allotted by the Transport Minister but in January 2015, auction processes started online and as part of the e-auction, registration numbers like 0001 or 1111 started to be sold to the highest bidder.

The most expensive registration number is 0001 and it has been fixed with minimum reserve price of Rs 5 lac. The second most expensive registration numbers are from 0002 to 0009 and the auction of these numbers started from Rs 3 lac. Numbers from 0010 to 0099 comes in the third category, the auction of which started from the base price of Rs 2 lac. Numbers such as 0100, 0111, 0200, 0222, 0300, 0333 up to 0999 started at Rs 1 lac.

For those who don’t want to spend so much money but still want unique numbers, they can go through Jump category at the cost of Rs 20,000 only. For instance, if the series of 1200 is going on and a person wants a number like 2786 or 7862 than he has to pay only 20,000 rupees and he can have a fancy number of his choice as per availability.

The government vehicles and private vehicles of certain dignitaries like MLAS, MPS, judges and top bureaucrats were given these numbers in the past year or so.

Under the new policy, the IAS officers are also included in the list of such dignitaries who can get a fancy number without e-auctioning. However, no such number can be transferred within a year.