The Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) administration is dragging its heels on plans to introduce security-featured number plates in the federal capital, which is a violation of the Motor Vehicle Ordinance. The ICT Excise and Taxation Office (ETO) registers around 200 vehicles daily. By April this year, the office had registered 35,884 vehicles.
An official source told Pakistan Today that in the year 2005-06 the ETO office registered 33,311 vehicles, in 2006-07, 45,146 and in 2007-08, 42,322. Similarly, in 2008-09, they registered 32,620 vehicles, in 2009-10, they registered 36,620 and by April 2010-2011, they registered 35,888 vehicles, he said.
The official said the introduction of security-featured number plates and strict implementation of Motor Vehicles Ordinance would help security agencies besides controlling the rising incidents of car lifting in the city. “Motorists mostly use attractive number plates and do not display the number plates given to them by the ETO. The use of various kinds of number plates is creating problems for the police,” he said.
He said that due to fancy and illegal number plates discrimination between a legal and fake number plate becomes very difficult. The motorists are not only using number plates of various sizes but also the digits displayed on these plates are so small in size that they cannot be read easily, he stated.
The official said that it was the joint responsibility of ICT administration and Islamabad Traffic Police (ITP) to take immediate steps to address this issue. An ITP official said they had repeatedly requested the ICT administration to prepare quality number plates and change their current format.
The ITP has launched several campaigns against the vehicles having unauthorized registration number plates, but it did nothing to control the use of fancy number plates, he said. The official disclosed the ITP had also sent a summery to the Interior Ministry, seeking a considerable increase in the amount of fines from Rs 300 to Rs 1,000 to discourage the motorists who display fancy number plates.
Excise and Taxation Director Naila Baqir told Pakistan Today that the ICT administration had singed an agreement with an internal company for the provision of security-featured number plates to the Excise and Taxation office. “The company will provide over 100 number plates every day to the Excise and Taxation office and these number plates will have proper sizes, beautiful shapes and quality,” she said.
Naila said the price of each number plate would be around Rs 800 and the ETO was likely to start issuing such number plates from August this year. She added that the number plates which had security features would be verified by the excise and taxation staff discharging their duty round the clock.
She disclosed that the number plates would have an identification mark which would be visible day and night. This mark would not be removed even with the help of some chemical or physical means from the plate, she added.
