KATHMANDU: The Department of Transport Management is preparing to call a global tender within this fiscal year to give momentum to its plan of replacing existing motor vehicle number plates with embossed plates.
A committee formed under the director general of the transport department is set to finalise bid documents within the next two weeks and forward it to the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport for final approval. Once the plan is endorsed, the department will invite interested parties to take part in the bidding process.
“We will call the tender within this fiscal year (by mid-July) to hire a firm which can supply embossed number plates for at least 10 years,” said Sarad Adhikari, officiating director general of the transport department. He said that they would start issuing the new plates to vehicles within the next fiscal year.
Once this process begins, the machine-made embossed number plates will replace the traditional hand-painted plates that are being used since automobiles first started plying on the roads of the country more than a century ago.
In the initial phase, the government plans to issue the plates to new vehicles and gradually to old vehicles. There are more than 1.7 million registered vehicles in the country, including 1.2 million plus two-wheelers. The transport department officials said that vehicle owners will probably have to pay around Rs 2,500 to obtain two embossed number plates and a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, also known as third licence. The RFID tag contains a microchip and stores information about the vehicle owner.
Adhikari said that the actual cost of the embossed number plate would be known only after the selection of number plate producer or supplier through the competitive bidding. The new number plate system is being introduced to create uniformity in licence plates, keep digital records of vehicles, discourage vehicle tax evasion and control auto theft.
As a part of adopting new technology, the transport department is also working on a project to implement smartcard technology based driving licences and bill books (vehicle owners’ certificate). The transport department is targeting to issue the electronic driving licences from 2015. The Asian Development Bank has provided grant assistance of $2.3 million to the government to implement the electronic driving licence system.
Based on the government’s original plan, both embossed number plates and electronic driving licences were supposed to be introduced by 2010. The transport department said that new number plate scheme failed to come into implementation due to numerous research studies that needed to be conducted, delay in deciding models, procurement procedures and implementation modalities. - See more at: http://thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=Transport+dept+to+call+global+tender+&NewsID=414038#sthash.l7uBoJGf.dpuf
No comments:
Post a Comment