The Road, Transport and Highways Ministry has come up with a new proposition to facilitate auto makers in recalling their defective vehicles, if such a situation arises, which is devised under the vehicle registration plan - Vahan. The rampant unofficial sale/purchase of pre-owned vehicles in India has troubled several car makers like Ford, Maruti Suzuki and Honda, among others, regarding vehicle recalls in the past.
In July 2011, the ministry started the Vahan and Sarathi programmes for smooth registration of vehicles at Regional Transport Offices (RTOs). Vahan entails for vehicle registration, road tax collection and issue of permits and clearances whereas, Sarathi regulates issue of learning licenses to drivers, conductors and driving schools.
Under the new proposal, the auto makers will be required to share the unique vehicle identification information at production with RTO. This will ensure the dual keep of vehicle identification data at RTO and at the auto maker terminals. Upon the change of a vehicle's ownership, the RTO will simply modify its data and update the new owner's details with the registered vehicle's unique information, which will put an end to the duplicity of records. It has also been hinted that the National Informatics Centre (NIC) would be the software developers for the proposed scheme.
Affirming the proposed scheme, a ministry official said, “The idea is to eliminate errors while filling in the chassis numbers and vehicle identification numbers during registration at RTOs. The system would avoid duality as RTOs would only have to change ownership details when vehicles are sold in the used-car market.” The ministry official also stated that all the discussions are at an initial stage and it would stay there for some time before the project details are finalised.
Currently, pre-owned vehicle sales amount to over 2.5 million in the country each year with most of the sales happening in the unorganised sector (close to 85 per cent). The present authentication process of changing ownership is very time consuming and a lot of consumers avoid it, citing the process is unreliable and trivial. Those who do proceed with the documentation are made to wait for an indefinite tenure. This scenario makes it very difficult for the auto makers to trace their defective vehicles in case a recall is required.
The rapidly increasing Indian automobile market had significantly impacted on the quality of new introduced. Rampant cases of terrible engineering have caused some serious concerns regarding the safety concerns of passengers. Recently, Ford India recalled over 1,11,000 units of Figo hatchback and Fiesta sedan to detect and fix shortcomings in its steering and rear suspensions. Honda too had entered the bandwagon in September, 2011 when it recalled 72,115 City sedans citing faulty power window switches. Country’s largest car maker, Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL) had also failed to refrain itself from list, when it recalled 13,157 units of Swift, Ritz hatchbacks and DZire sedan to revise its engine against faults.
