KATHMANDU: With more than 500 thousand licenses to be printed, the mass printer that the government has bought has gone out of order again.

In August, the Department of Transportation Management had promised to provide the license to all those applying for the smart license by November, as the mass printer, then, was supposed to print more than a thousand licenses a day.

According to sources, the number of people waiting for their smart license has reached more than 50 million now while the mass printer the government has bought is out of order.

Citing the frequent problem in printing, the government had expected the purchase of the mass printer to redeem it of its trouble.

With the mounting pressure from the public, the DoTM had decided to purchase mass printers which were claimed to have the capacity of printing more than 10 thousand smart licenses in a day. DoTM had spent 49.7 million for the mass printer.

Through the Madras Printer Pvt. Ltd. with the machine, Madras Security Print had taken the responsibility of supplying 1 million cards for printing smart license.

Unfortunately, even after 5 months of purchase, the mass printer is not brought to use yet.

Gogan Bahadur Hamal, the Director-General of DoTM, claims to have printed 2500 smart licenses every day. However, the sources at DoTM told Khabarhub, with a request of anonymity, that the mass printer is out of order again.

“We had brought it to operation one week ago,” the source told Khabarhub, “however, after 2 days operation it displayed a technical error and is now shut down.”

“The company is working to resolve the technical error that came to Madras Printers,” the source at DoTM said.

Meaningless Visits

To ensure the efficient performance of the printer, the company had called the team of technicians supposed to operate the machine in Nepal to Italy for training.

Raghubhir Mahasheth, then Minister for the Physical Infrastructure and Transportation, had sent Rajeshwor Gyawali, the administrative head at the Ministry, Pramila Bajracharya, the Joint Secretary at the Transport Management Department in the ministry, Gogan Bahadur Hamal, Director General of DoTM, Bandhu Bastola, the Director at DoTM, Som Raj Baral, the personal secretary of Minister Mahaseth and Keshav Gautam, the only computer engineer of the technical department had been sent to attend the training in Italy.

Under the guise of study for the procurement of Madras Printer, the team had gone to Italy tour.

To a Khabarhub’s query whether the tour had been meaningless, DG Hamal said, “The visit was at the leadership level, we had not been there for the training.”

The project manager of Madras Printer has been in the department to facilitate smart license printing. He is said to be coordinating with the department.

Millions of license-seeker suffering

Out of 5 old printers the department has only 3 are in operation as 2 are out of order.  Even the machines in operation often show technical problems.

Status quo, the department is sure to take months to provide the license even to the customers who have already processed it.

Although 17 different branches of the DoTM distribute the license, the office at Minbhawan, Kathmandu is the only place to print license. Sadly, while the crowd of license seeker is increasing in all offices, the mass printer meant to print license quickly is dumped useless.

Owing to the government’s decisions to issue a smart license replacing the paper license, the balance between the demand of license and its supply is far from sight.

The license seekers are still waiting for their licenses for more than a year.

Above it all, the department often faces the problem of insufficient cards. According to the sources at DoTM, quite often the printing is stalled due to the lack of cards.

“Sometimes it takes quite long to import,” the sources say. More than 500 thousand Nepali license seekers are waiting to collect their license.

The Department had started printing license from the Transportation Management Office, Kathmandu since 2015, whereas other branches started the printing after 2017 only.