Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) has issued an order on Wednesday wherein only autos with stickers issued by the civic body will be allowed to ply on city roads.
The move is aimed at decongesting the roads by keeping a check on rogue autos.
This is the first time that RMC has come out with such an order. Earlier, the district administration had issued orders and conducted raids against permit-less autos but to no avail.
The last major order was issued in 2015 by the Regional Transport Authority under which a colour-coded rule was introduced to restrict illegal autos. Autos having permits needed to be painted in green to ply within the capital. The rest, which reserved their black body and yellow hood, were allowed to ply outside the RMC area.
The latest RMC order requires all bona fide autos to collect a special sticker specifying the route from the civic body by paying a nominal fee and one-time parking amount and paste it on their windscreens.
Auto drivers have to apply to RMC between April 7 and April 11 by paying Rs 100. RMC will issue passes on April 28, following paper verification and the new rule will be implemented from May 1. An auto without a sticker will have to pay a penalty of Rs 25,000.
An RMC official said the move would help to weed out forgery and duplicity.
"Those who don't have permits have also coloured their vehicles green to avoid raids. Now, we shall issue a special RMC-certified sticker to only autos with valid permits. One has to furnish a pollution certificate and all valid clearances and papers to get the sticker. Automatically, fake autos will be weeded out," he said.
"We will also take a lumpsum amount of Rs 4,500 in advance from the auto driver at a rate of Rs 50 per day for issuing a one-time pass for parking. Both stickers and parking passes will be valid for three years. After paying the one-time parking fee, they won't have to pay parking charges anywhere in the city except at the railway station and airport," he said.
However, the plan seems more convincing on paper. "What if RMC babus issue stickers by compromising the documents?" Saket Sharma, a resident of old HB road, said.
"We will work out a plan to curb it, too. We already have data from district transport authority on the number of autos with permits. Since stickers are only for permitted autos, there will be less scope for issuing dubious stickers," an RMC official said.
Vending zones
To ease traffic bottlenecks owing to the presence of vendors along Main Road, RMC on Wednesday notified eight temporary vending zones - Purulia road, Shastri Market, Ranchi-Khunti road, and the roads near Kotwali PS, old police station, opposite Rabindra Bhavan site in Kutchery, near Nepal House and near HEC gate ground.
Additional municipal commissioner Bidyanand Sharma Pankaj said a meeting to fine-tune the plan had been scheduled on April 9.
The relocation will happen after that. On the permanent vending zone proposed at Jaipal Singh stadium, Pankaj said work was on and it would take another year to get completed.
