Soon, pay road tax online

BANGALORE: Soon, you may  be able to pay road tax for vehicles online. The transport department is in its final stages of launching an e-payment service to remit   pending road tax for vehicles.  “The service will be linked with Khajane experiment of the government and is expected to go online in the next 3 months,” said T Sham Bhat, commissioner for Transport Department. A Treasury project, Khajane takes all 216 treasury offices in the state online and connects them to a central server in the state secretariat through VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals).  The e-payment system of the department will be routed through the Khajane project and will thus provide updated information on all payments in the state. “This measure will ease matters for dealers who usually pay road tax before handing over the vehicle to the purchaser. It will be available all over the state,” added Bhat. The current process involves multiple visits to the regional transport office (RTO) and most of the times the process is delayed as the number of vehicles being registered every day is large. Also falling under the purview of e-payment service will be operators of transport fleets who currently pay a quarterly tax for vehicles. “They can also make their payments online. This will help save time as they have to return to the RTO regularly to pay,” said Bhat. Owners who have vehicles registered in other states however will still have to visit the RTO to have their vehicles evaluated to determine the road tax amount. “One visit to the office would be enough, also if a person is well-versed with the Motor Vehicles Act and knows exactly how much tax needs to be paid, he can go ahead and pay the tax,” said Bhat. Road tax for outside state vehicles is calculated based on the factory price and manufacturing date of the vehicle. ERP project on the cardsThis measure is part of a larger project undertaken by the transport department to implement Enterprise Resource Planning systems which would enable the department to function as a paperless office. “Planning for the ERP project is on. It is expected to take off sometime this year, but it is still in its nascent stages,” the Transport commissioner said.