VAHAN is the flagship e-Governance application under
National Transport Project, a Mission Mode Project initiated
in year 2006. The purpose of the application was to automate
the RTO operations related to Vehicle Registration, Permit,
Taxation, Enforcement in the whole country. The project has
achieved a many successes and crossed significant milestones
in the past years.
In 2009, another major initiative was undertaken to
consolidate the RTO data to State and Central levels in the
form of State Registry (SR) and National Registry (NR)
databases through periodic replication mechanism. A number of
National and State level online applications are running on
these consolidated databases. These include citizen-centric
applications, trade-facilitation, payment services and
information services apart from enabling data exchange with a
number of external 3rd party applications.
In 2014 a new initiative has been undertaken to
consolidate the whole distributed system into a single entity
with the twin objective of achieving proper control, security
and manageability of the currently distributed systems and
also extending the scope and quality of G-to-C, G-to-B and
G-to-G services. This will also enable real time access of
full set of data without need of any partial and periodic
replication. This application is planned to be rolled out by
1st half of 2015.
The proposed architecture will consolidate the database
and applications for all RTOs across all states into a
common, centralized platform and deliver the core services of
Vahan to all the RTOs across the country. The system will be
built on the backbone of a robust data network with adequate
bandwidth and built-in redundancy to facilitate highest
acceptable standard of speed, information security and fault
tolerance. The data and application for the whole country
will be maintained in a national level data center backed up
by a Disaster Recovery Center – both of which will have the
latest hardware, software and control infrastructure to
achieve optimum operational performance, safety and security.
There will be emphasis on modern ICT tools like cloud
infrastructure, Centralized Authentication System (CAS) and
Single Sign On (SSO), Multi-device capability, Multi-lingual
support, Digital Signature, Open API, Mobile Apps and so on.