Indore: Licence Applicants Face Brunt Of Sarathi Portal’s Maintenance

Indore (Madhya Pradesh): All work related to driving licences has come to a halt at the Regional Transport Office for the last two days, Moreover, there will be no relief for the applicants till Monday as the ministry has clarified that the Sarathi portal of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways server is ‘Down for Database Maintenance.’

The ministry has been flashing a message on the page of the portal “Sarathi portal will not be available till 10:00 AM of 18/05/2024(Saturday) due to urgent DB maintenance. The inconvenience caused is deeply regretted.” Meanwhile, a large number of applicants for new driving licences, renewal of licences, or for getting duplicate licences had to face a tough time in getting their work done.

Hundreds of applicants had to wait for hours for the last two days and on Thursday, the officials started telling the applicants about the maintenance issue. “Yes, there is a server issue as the server is down for database maintenance. The issue will be resolved by Saturday and the work could be resumed as normal on Monday,” RTO Pradeep Sharma, said.

Meanwhile, official sources said that the server issue has become a routine in RTO as it is down every fortnight.  “A similar issue erupted in February when the server was down for more than 10 days causing a revenue loss of over Rs 10 crore to RTO, Indore,” sources said.

Over 3,000 DL go into pendency

The Transport Department totally depends on the Sarathi portal to access applications for driving licences. The complete shut down from the last two days is causing inconvenience to the applicants, especially those who have applied for new licences, along with increasing the backlog.  “We receive around 300 to 400 applications for new licences and about 100-150 for renewal of licences every day.  

The work is pending due to the issue and it will remain the same till Saturday. We will initiate clearing pendency of work from Monday on priority basis,” the RTO said.