Hyderabad: Seized vehicles to be put on auction

Hyderabad: With thousands of vehicles piling up at various RTA office premises, the Transport Department is now getting ready to auction them. These vehicles have been lying in these premises for over six years. Generally, vehicles are seized if there is no fitness certificate, no permit to travel or for other violations of the Motor Vehicle Act and are kept in the custody of the RTO. The vehicle owners can pay the required fee and take their vehicles. However, some of them do not turn up to take the vehicles for various reasons like lack of money to pay the hefty penalties among other reasons. 

The RTA premises where vehicles have piled up in Hyderabad are Nagole, Secunderabad, Khairatabad and other offices. Most of these vehicles have reached the stage of scrap as they are exposed to vagaries of nature. Waterlogging has eroded the vehicles to a great extent. Apart from the RTA premises, the officials park the seized vehicles in RTC depots but the TSRTC officials asked the Transport Department to clear them from their premises in 2019. According to sources, the department officials have been instructed to take up the process of disposing off the vehicles lying in the RTA offices immediately. Sources also said that the officials have asked the RTAs to dispose of all the vehicles by September. It may be mentioned here that the police authorities too have auctioned the seized vehicles recently. According to sources, there are about 10,000 vehicles in all the eleven RTA offices, including 5,000 vehicles in Nagole, 1,000 vehicles in Secunderabad and 500 in Khairatabad.

As per the rules, the authorities should issue notices to the owners as per the address in the Registration Certificate (RC book), asking them to pay the penalty and take their vehicle. The officials said that it was the responsibility of the owners to take their vehicle after paying the fine. If no one turns up, they would dispose of the vehicles through auction. Three notices would be issued, and an auction notice would be placed in the newspapers before resorting to auction, a senior official said.