Car dealerships causing delays in issuing RCs, allege customers

A major initiative of the state government to make the registration of newly purchased vehicle an easy task for people seems to be going haywire as dealers have allegedly been causing delays in providing permanent numbers to customers at the time of purchase.

A major initiative of the state government to make the registration of newly purchased vehicle an easy task for people seems to be going haywire as dealers have allegedly been causing delays in providing permanent numbers to customers at the time of purchase.

Initiating the scheme as a part of transport sector reforms in October last year - during the last tenure of the SAD-BJP coalition, the state government had announced that customers purchasing new vehicles could deposit the motor vehicle tax to dealers at the time of the purchase and get a permanent registration number from the 50 numbers displayed on a realtime basis.

However, it has come to light that dealers have not been issuing the permanent number to vehicle owners at the time of purchase and have been causing delays in depositing the money to the department for a considerable time. This not only is causing harassment to customers, but is also resulting in loss to the state exchequer. Besides this, the dealers, it is alleged, have also been charging more than the prescribed taxes, causing loss to the customers.

Another resident, who did not wish to be named, said dealers had been swindling money out of customers pocket in the name of providing permanent registration numbers at the time of purchasing the vehicle but the same had not been provided and customers were being made to wait for a considerable time.

District transport officer (DTO) Manpreet Singh, however, denied this. "No such case has come in to my knowledge so far," he said. "The system in this regard is transparent and as soon as somebody buys a vehicle, the permanent number is provided to him and this is conveyed to the department through a software."

"After this, the department issues an RC on the basis of this number. There might be a delay in handing over of the documents to customer, but there arise out of the question of dealers not giving permanent number to customers," he said.

Narinder Singh, general manager of Stan autos said that the delay in providing permanent numbers to buyers might be due to many reasons. "Sometimes there are some complications in payment for the vehicles, which leads to delay in providing permanent registration numbers to customers. Some delay might occur at the part of dealers but it is due to technical reasons," he said.