MUMBAI, Jan 11: Maharashtra transport officials have found fake engine and chassis numbers on 60 vehicles, mostly buses and trucks, from Arunachal Pradesh that were re-registered at the Vasai regional transport office (RTO) in the past three years, with transporters and activists calling it a huge “scam”.
The Vasai RTO office, which has jurisdiction over the Palghar district, has claimed that these vehicles might have been registered with bogus documents in Arunachal Pradesh before being transferred to Maharashtra as the engine and chassis numbers did not match with the records of their manufacturers, as per official documents accessed by PTI.
The documents suggest that the Vasai RTO got the vehicle records verified through the authorised dealers of the respective automobile manufacturers. It filed a police case last month and also wrote to other RTOs in the state, stressing the need to track these vehicles – 34 buses and 26 trucks.
Last year, the Vashi RTO had filed a similar case concerning about half a dozen Arunachal-registered buses.
Transporters and activists wondered how the officials at Vasai RTO failed to spot the fake chassis and engine numbers of such a large number of vehicles. RTO staff are well trained to identify if the chassis and engine numbers of a vehicle are tampered with just one look, they said.
The vehicles might have been transferred out of the northeastern state to evade taxes or escape other compliance issues, they suspect.
Dashrath Waghule, deputy regional transport officer of Vasai RTO, said that on the directives of the transport commissioner’s office, they checked their records of Arunachal Pradesh-registered vehicles in the last three years, and during the process, they learnt about these 60 vehicles.
“The police investigation is underway. Prime facie, it looks like the vehicles were registered with bogus documents in Arunachal Pradesh,” Waghule said.
Generally, vehicles are transferred to Maharashtra from other states after buying or selling or a change in the owner’s address.
Activist Shirkant Karve, who has in the past raised the issue of alleged non-compliance with the Motor Vehicles Act by RTOs, questioned how so many vehicles with bogus chassis and engine numbers from a particular state were registered at Vasai RTO when every vehicle undergoes the fitness renewal process while being transferred to Maharashtra from outside.
As per procedure, RTO inspectors are expected to check the fitness of a vehicle besides verifying its chassis and engine numbers before transferring it to their RTO from other states, Karve said.
“How senior officials of Vasai RTO did not find anything suspicious when so many vehicles from a particular state were being re-registered,” he asked.
A senior RTO inspector, who is not authorised to speak to the media, told PTI that a vehicle owner first applies to the assistant RTO of the office where they want to register it.
After verifying documents, including the No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the source RTO, the assistant RTO directs inspectors to register the vehicle after checking its fitness. The process also includes verification of the chassis and engine numbers.
According to RTO officials and agents, the buses must be the ones auctioned by banks after their owners defaulted on EMI payments, while the trucks are those BS-IV (Bharat Stage Emission Standards 4) which dealers might have failed to sell before the government deadline.
They said that the vehicles were registered in Arunachal Pradesh, where the nationwide online vehicle registration system Vahan-4 was not operational then, on the basis of physical bogus documents.
NOCs were then arranged from there for the re-registration of the vehicles in Maharashtra.
According to bus operators, the list of the Arunachal Pradesh-registered buses at Vasai RTO could be longer as they may not have the data of those vehicles that have already been transferred to other RTOs in Maharashtra or neighbouring states through them.
KV Shetty, a leader of bus operators, claimed that he had alerted transport officials, including the ones from the Vasai RTO, about the Arunachal-registered buses. But they ignored it, he said.
“A CBI probe should be ordered in this scam,” Shetty said, adding that now the RTO is taking action against the current owners of the buses. “First, it should take action against its inspectors and ARTOs for re-registering the vehicles without proper verification,” he said.
During COVID, banks seized several buses over the non-payment of loan EMIs, said an RTO agent. While banks auctioned the vehicles, government tax was due on them. Instead of paying tax, the persons who bought these buses registered them in other states after tampering with chassis and engine numbers, he said.
“Before registering in Arunachal Pradesh, the auctioned buses were not officially scrapped as they had their taxes pending. Now, one bus is live at two RTOs with two chassis and engine numbers,” he said.
According to RTO officials, vehicles that are more than 8 years old are not allowed to ply in Mumbai. Therefore, several overaged vehicles were first registered in Arunachal Pradesh reducing their age with fake documents and then re-registered in Maharashtra, they said. (PTI)
