This was again some good amount of time back when I was in college. Me and my friend decided to buy a motorcycle(from here on which I will refer to as bike). We were going to share the cost of the vehicle, as we were in the same batch and class in college and lived in the same rented house.

We bought a bike after days of searching through various markets in Delhi and registered it to my name. Read the story below.

The Story

Once we decided to buy a bike, the next step was to go forward an search for it. The nearest pre-owned bike markets from my place were the one at Subhash Nagar and the other at Karol bagh.

We started visiting dealers. Which made me create a list of things that you need to check before buying a second hand vehicle. I was thinking of sharing that too, but I see this article, covers all of those points and some more.

So after about 15 days of continuous searching we finalized a bike. Now we had to get it transferred to our(mine or my friend’s) name.

The dealer said “Pay us Rs1500 we will get it done for you”, but this time again I wanted to see what actually is the process and Rs1500 sounded like an excessive amount for this work.

The dealer already had the owner’s information in the forms with his signature. We took those forms and decided that we will complete this work next week on our own.

Getting all the required documents

The following documents were needed for the registration process:

• Registration certificate in original
• Form no.29
• Form no.30
• Valid insurance certificate
• Address proof of purchaser
• Pollution Under Control Certificate

By the look of it we thought that we already had all of these papers. But we later on realized that the insurance had just expired. So now to register the vehicle we need an insurance certificate.

Visit to Insurance office

We told the official that we need to register this vehicle. He gave us good advice on how we should proceed.

He told us:

That to get an insurance claim the holder’s name should be same on both the insurance certificate and the registration certificate. So if I get an insurance on the current owner’s name, it will become invalid after the vehicle gets transferred to my name. And I will need to go through the insurance process again!.

Other option was that I get the insurance done on my name. But the risk here would be, that if something happens to the bike in the period when the registration process is going on, I wouldn’t get any claim because till that time I wouldn’t have become the owner of the bike.

So I decided to take some risk and went ahead with the second option. We got the insurance certificate and went to the transport authority.

Visit to transport authority

We had already planned that we will reach the transport authority(Janakpuri) as soon as it opened for public. We reached there on time and similar to my court experience we were surrounded by agents.

I ignored them as usual and stood up there in the queue, which wasn’t very long as office had just opened. My turn at the counter came and I handed over the documents to the officer. Who after a brief moment of inspection said “Your RC is damaged, fill up another xyz form and submit again”.

Hmm.. so all that smartness of coming here early and doing things on our own seemed to be failing, I thought maybe the officer is doing this for some money 🙁 . It was clear I wasn’t going to offer him any. So I confirmed the form number again from him and moved forward to the form counter.

I was thinking that it would be just another form. But this needed the owner’s declaration along with his signature. Now I thought we have the following options:

1. Give the officer some gift(read bribe) to get this work done without this hassle.
2. Go to an agent or to the dealer and ask him to get the work done with some price involved.
3. Find the owner and get his signatures.

I thought of going with #3 as not going with #1 and #2 was the reason that pushed me to be here in the first place. And I had nothing to lose if #3 didn’t work, the other options will still be open.

Visiting the owner.

We checked out to see that the owner lived not very far away from the transport authority. We started our address hunt(both of us didn’t have Gmaps(read smartphone) at that time to use navigation). In twenty minutes we reached the address. Rang the bell and asked the person who attended the bell with confidence as if we are friends with the owner.

Great! He was still here and luckily at home too!. We met him and told him that we need this document signed. He asked us a few questions and happily signed the document for us.

Re-visiting the transport authority.

Ok the queue was longer now and we weren’t even sure that this time something new wouldn’t crop up. We didn’t have any option either. We stood in two separate lines(so that whoever reaches the counter first will do the needful). I reached first, handed over all the required papers and.. they were accepted this time! Yay!.

We were handed out a receipt and the total money we had to pay was somewhere around Rs200, So a saving of Rs1300, this was huge for us at that time!

Learnings:

1. Don’t be afraid of the process.
2. Sometimes the Govt. processes(or other such processes) just work, without the need of agents, but with our ignorance we encourage this agent business.
3. Going through the process adds to your knowledge. You also know the information given out in the forms is correct and will help you avoid any kind of future problems due to incorrect information supplied by an agent.
4. You can help others with this knowledge.
5. Save out on a few bucks, especially if you have some time at your disposal.

Give such things a try first, if you can and your time allows it. It would give you better perspective of how things really are in the state or the country.