Vehicle revenue licence issuance via online loses public appeal
The Motor Traffic Department’s ( MTD) e Revenue licence ( eRL) project introduced 11 years ago to make this vehicle licence issuance manageable for the department and convenient for vehicle owners is still to achieve the expected results, official data revealed.
Vehicle owners would still visit divisional secretariats to renew their vehicle revenue licences although this facility is now available online under the e Revenue licence project, a senior official of the MTD told the Business Times.
The MTD has developed one Information Technology solution for Western Province – MTD and another for Divisional Secretariats for speeding up the licence issuance process.
According to official data, only 89,261 vehicle owners have renewed their licences online out of 5.7 million revenue licences issued by the MTD and divisional secretariats last year. This amounts to 1.6 per cent of the total vehicle population in the country.
As per latest published statistics 5.7 million vehicles were in use in Sri Lanka last year and the majority of them are registered in the Western Province.
Accordingly there are over 1.2 million vehicles registered in the Western Province and this amounts to 25 per cent of the entire vehicle population.
Even though the obtaining of revenue licences is at the finger tips of vehicle owners via online at present, it has failed to attract the attention of the majority of those owners, a senior official of the Passenger Transport Management Ministry said.
In 2009 the work on the eRL system was completed and it was officially launched by Lalith Weeratunga, Secretary to the President at that time.
It is a centralised system running on the Lanka Government Cloud, Lanka Government Network and Lanka Gate which have been developed by the Information Communication technology Agency (ICTA).
The authenticity of all supporting documents is verified online by connecting to nine insurance companies, two emission testing companies and the MTD, hence no bogus documents can be submitted.
The revenue licence can be obtained online which means the service is available on the basis of 24 hours x 7 days.
In order to enable the acceptance of credit card payments for eRL the Public Finance Department issued the "Finance Regulation Circular 447". ICTA connected an Internet Payment Gateway to Lanka Gate to enable online payment.
However the eRL project is yet to be popularised among vehicle owners due to some shortcomings in the system, an IT expert said adding that most of the people are still not familiar with the system.
He noted that this system should be more user friendly and 100 per cent free from defects and money transaction risks or faults via online to attract more vehicle owners.
Another factor was the lack of IT literacy and reluctance of the people in using credit or debit cards for the payment of the licence fee, he added.