CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu has finally included provisions to nominate a legal heir while buying a new vehicle but flaws exist.
Until now, transferring a vehicle’s ownership after the owner’s death was tough as there was no provision to nominate someone while buying. Legal heirs of the deceased struggled to transfer vehicle ownership to their names. One had to submit nine different government documents with RTOs within 90 days to get it done.
In December 2020, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways amended the Motor Vehicles Act, allowing vehicle owners to nominate anybody while registering a vehicle and allowed states to take a call. TN accepted it in January 2022.
Pointing out shortcomings in TN’s attempt, K Kathirmathiyon, a transportation activist, said Puducherry, which introduced the provision this week, gave wide publicity to it. But the TN transport department did not issue even a press release. Not only the public or automobile dealers, even some RTOs are unaware about it till date as nominee details were not printed on the RC.
“Such nominations were possible during new vehicle purchase or sale. There was no provision to add or change nominee while possessing of a vehicle. This defeats the purpose of amending a rule as the benefit has not been extended to crores of old vehicles on road. It would hardly take a day for RTOs to make changes in names, addresses on existing RC cards. Similarly, they can collect fees and add/change nominees and print the same on RCs as banks do on passbooks in case of FD accounts,” he added.
