Embossed number plate is not mandatory

The Department of Transportation Management has stated that embossed number plates will not be mandatory in all vehicles from July 17. After the issue was widely criticized, the Department has apologized for the inconvenience caused to the public service users due to the information published for affixing embossed number plate on the vehicle.

An embossed number plate is a technology number plate attached to a vehicle. Vehicle number plates with this technology have been used in most developed countries.

This issue was first introduced in the budget seven years ago. After that, an agreement was reached between the Department of Transportation and Decatur Tiger IT for a project related to the production of embossed number plates.

It was mentioned in the project that Decatur Tiger IT will do all the work from production of embossed plates to connection to vehicles and will transfer all hardware and software to the Government of Nepal plans to install such plates on 2.5 million vehicles within 5 years. For this, RFID Gates had to be installed at 5 different places entering Kathmandu Valley and 5 places outside the valley.

In the initial stage, when the names of the provinces were not finalized, number plates were attached to the numerical bases of the provinces. However, due to Covid, the work was slow. At present, 250,000 number plates have been produced in the Department of Transportation Management and are in the store.

In the current budget session of the parliament, the lawmakers had protested on this issue. Nepali Congress General Secretary and MP Gagan Thapa had urged the government to reverse the decision. Earlier, there were protests against it in streets.