The Commissioner General of Motor Traffic has urged the public to stop paying brokers for driving licences, warning that applicants who do so have ended up holding forgeries.

Air Vice Marshal (Retd.) Thushara Indunil Fernando said a joint programme with the police is currently under way to stop brokers entering the Department of Motor Traffic offices at Narahenpita and Werahera, NewsFirst reported.

The warning is directed at applicants rather than at the brokers: people who pay are not obtaining a genuine licence faster, they are buying a fake one.

Werahera has been here before

The choice of those two offices is not arbitrary, and the department’s own recent history explains it.

In April, police arrested two men over a forged driving licence racket operating out of the Werahera office — the same site now being policed. One was a security officer employed at the DMT itself, found in possession of nine official security stickers used in the licence-issuance process. The other was arrested after an undercover officer posing as an applicant arranged to buy a licence for Rs. 10,000.

That case established the mechanism the Commissioner General is now describing. A broker outside the building is only useful to a buyer if something inside the building can be reached, and in April what could be reached was the security stickers that make a licence look genuine. The current operation is aimed at the access point: keeping brokers out of the premises in the first place.

The queue is what creates the market

The demand side has a figure attached to it.

On 2 October, DMT officials told Parliament’s Sectoral Oversight Committee on Infrastructure and Strategic Development that about 678,000 driving licences were waiting to be printed, and that the backlog was still growing — printing capacity stood at roughly 4,600 licences a day, which was not enough to keep pace with demand. The committee, chaired by MP S.M. Marikkar, ordered a formal investigation into delays in issuing both licences and number plates.

A backlog of that size is the precondition for a broker trade. When the legitimate route is understood to take an indefinite period, a payment that promises to shorten it finds buyers — and, on the Commissioner General’s account, those buyers receive a forgery.

Two new printing machines were expected to be installed by 15 October, which would have roughly doubled daily capacity to about 8,200 licences. That date fell yesterday. No filing reports whether the machines were installed, whether capacity has in fact increased, or what the backlog stands at now. Friday’s statement does not mention the backlog at all.

The office and the post

Fernando was appointed to the post on 25 August on a contract basis with Cabinet approval, filling a vacancy, and assumed duties on 1 September at the department’s head office on Elvitigala Mawatha, Colombo 05.

The vacancy he filled had its own origin. His predecessor as Commissioner General, Kamal Amarasinghe, was remanded in April over allegations of aiding the fraudulent registration of a vehicle through an altered chassis number, and was later granted bail. The official now warning the public about document fraud at the department took over a post vacated amid a document-fraud prosecution — a connection no filing draws, and one that is noted here as context rather than as any suggestion of a link between the two matters.

Fernando has used public warnings as an instrument before, including one in October against selling vehicles on open transfer documents.

Not reported

The filing gives no scale for the problem: no number of fraudulent licences detected, no estimate of how many are in circulation, no figure for what brokers charge, and no arrests or prosecutions arising from the current joint programme. It does not say when the programme began, how long it will run, how many officers are involved, or what happens to someone found holding a licence bought through a broker — whether they are treated as a victim or an offender.

It also does not say how brokers were obtaining or imitating genuine licences, whether any current DMT staff are under investigation, or whether offices beyond Narahenpita and Werahera are affected.

This article rests on a single verified source. A search of the other verified newsrooms returned no same-day filing on these remarks, which is the usual pattern for a departmental advisory of this kind.

Source: NewsFirst.