Govt starts issuing learners’ driving licence in colleges
NEWDELHI: The Delhi government on Saturday launched its long pending project of issuing learners’ driving licence at government colleges with four students of two colleges — Acharya Narendra Dev College and Industrial Training Institute, Pusa — becoming the first to receive their learners licence from their campus itself.
Hindustan Times on August 12 was the first to report that the service of issuing learners’ driving licence at government colleges would be launched by the transport department on Saturday.
“Today we started the facility of conducting learners’ licence test and issuing the certificate hand-to-hand at two colleges in Delhi,” said transport commissioner Varsha Joshi.
The transport department said two students each from the Acharya Narendra Dev College and Industrial Training Institute, Pusa , were able to clear the online test and obtained the learners’ licence on Saturday. “There were about six applications in each college which the principals received. Rest could not give the exam due to insufficient documents,” said an official .
The transport department, however, could not begin the license issuing process in two other colleges . “The service will be available at GB Pant Institute of Technology and Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies by next week. We could not start it there because admission process is currently going on,” the official added.
The Delhi government on August 7 had issued a notification appointing directors and principals of educational and training institutes as “licencing authorities”. This means that apart from the usual motor licencing officers of the transport department, commonly known as RTOS, heads of government colleges can also now issue learner’s license.
Once launched in the four colleges, the service will gradually be expanded to cover all Delhi government colleges and 10 others from Delhi University. Last week while surfing channels, an escalator accident caught my attention. It was obviously the fag end of the report, so all I could see was the video of a child’s foot being caught in an escalator and the mother and the child screaming for help as passersby looked on helplessly. Till someone came and pressed the emergency stop button and brought the escalator to a halt!
I do not know where this happened — it wasn’t in India — but it reminded me of an even more tragic incident that happened in Chennai this April, where the loose end of the adjustment band of the shoulder strap of a ten-year-old boy’s backpack got caught in the moving handrail. Here too, if only the onlookers — who screamed for help and asked the boy to throw the bag away — knew about the emer-