Pune : Website of RTOs across pan India shut for 2 days ; license services impacted more 

Pune residents faced challenges with license services on Thursday and Friday due to the nationwide breakdown of the Regional Transport Offices’ (RTOs) online system. A breakdown occurred in the National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) online system, which runs the Sarathi driving license application system. Throughout India, the NIC server went down on Thursday morning.

Speaking to Pune Pulse, Sanjeev Bhor, Deputy Commissioner, RTO Pune said, “The websites of all RTOs in the entire country remained shut for 2 days due to server issues at the end of the National Informatics Centre (NIC). This had impacted several license services such as learning license & more. However, the website began functioning smoothly yesterday (2^nd February) in which the Pune RTO started operating around 1:30 pm to 2 pm. Now, everything on the website is functioning well.”

As per information, operations at the Pune RTO, including procedures like issuing driving licenses (including learner’s licenses), renewing licenses, changing license addresses, removing fake licenses, etc came to an abrupt stop after the online system went down.

Driving schools have demanded better online services of RTO & ensuring that such kinds of malfunctions do not happen again.

Raju Ghatole, President, Motor Driving School Owners Association, Maharashtra, said, “Due to the failure of the online system, all kinds of works of the Transport Department of India became disorganized. Payments & transactions for any reason related to transport were not being done, the people who had taken appointments for learning licenses had to keep waiting. Hence, people had to face the brunt of the website breakdown. So, the online services of RTO must be strengthened, the online system must be user-friendly & must benefit the people in all ways.”

Shreyas Vange