- I Paid A Bribe
- 13 years ago
- 270 views
Without RTO book and license, I had few options but to part with the money
- Police
- Traffic Violations
- Paid INR 3,000
********** of the State ********** was recently transferred to Hyderabad. ********** – a simple and honest person – drove his car from Bangalore to Hyderabad. He wanted to pay the life time tax applicable to the state of AP within a month of his arrival – though one is allowed up to six months usually. Since the website of the RTO Hyderabad was of little help, and a visit to the city RTO office to understand the formalities proved completely futile, he sought the help of a recommended middle man to navigate his way through the RTO office. ********** saw nothing wrong with this, because he was not short circuiting the system. On the contrary, he wanted help to do what a lot of people keep postponing.
********** was escorted by the middleman to one of the Inspectors, who asked ********** to sign a certain form and stated that he would have to pay Rs 31,000 towards the life time tax of his seven year old Wagon R. This was fine with **********. However, just as he was about to sign the form, he tried reading the contents of the form. Being from Karnataka, he could not quite decipher the form in Telugu. However, he noticed a word or two in the form, which seemed to suggest that his car had been impounded and hence he was being fined, quite apart from being charged the standard life time tax!
Taken aback, ********** stated that this was hardly the fact. He had been here barely a month. Nobody impounded his car and that he was here entirely on his own to do the right thing! The Inspector tersely told him, and the middle-man reaffirmed the fact, that this was the ONLY way to 'settle the matter of the life time tax' for a vehicle that had been driven into the state! If he did not want the comment relating to the impounding of the car, well, he should take his car back to Karnataka and get a No Objection Certificate (or NOC as it is referred to ubiquitously). He was also told with a grin that he would have to take his car back to Karnataka to present the car physically before the authorities! He was assured that all this was just a formality and the only way to avoid taking his car back to Bangalore. So ********** had no option but to proceed with the strange Kafkaesque formality.
Now ********** had to go and get a Bank Draft (credit cards are too advanced a technology in the RTOs) and present himself another Inspector, who found the Draft in order. But he stated that ********** had to deposit his original RTO book and his driving license with him and could collect it four days later. Thus parted with his major documents, he was informed by the middleman (who had all along refused to mention his fee for his services of helping ********** navigate through the complex web of the RTO system) that if he really wanted his documents back without undue delay and harassment and several trips to the unseemly premises of the RTO, he would have to shell out another Rs 3000 in cash which would be actually shared by the various office bearers in the RTO office for processing his documents! Well, without his RTO book and license, ********** had few options but to part with the money. Yes, he could have approached the police or the Anti Corruption Bureau, except that they are no cleaner than the RTO office and an average citizen has a greater aversion to the police than the RTO office.