Getting a driving licence may become tougher

The Motor Vehicles Department of Maharashtra has forwarded a ground-breaking proposal to the state government for testing aspiring drivers in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. It has suggested setting up 9-10 tracks for computerised testing of aspiring drivers’ skills – taking turns, driving on bridges & through gradient curves, and identifying & negotiating signals. The idea behind this is to create a central testing facility spread over a large area of about 50 acres with enough driving test tracks to test the skills of driving licence applicants from Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai simultaneously. Apart from the tracks, the testing facility would have everything required for the driving tests – signboards, vehicles and computers with necessary software. At present, none of the driving test tracks in the MMR region has the necessary infrastructure to exhaustively test a driving applicant’s skills. The importance of the new proposal can be seen from the fact that about 25% of all the licences issued in Maharashtra are issued by RTOs in the three regions of Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai, with about 1500 aspiring drivers taking driving tests at these RTOs every day.