Number plates won’t display provincial coding from January: Transport State Minister

• Characters to identify the provinces were added to the number plate when registering vehicles

By Chaturanga Samarawickrama

Issuing of vehicle number plates sans provincial code indicators will come to effect from January 1, Transport State Minister Dilum Amunugama said. 

The proposal made by the Transport Minister Gamini Lokuge was approved by the Cabinet yesterday.
Accordingly, the characters to identify the provinces were added to the number plate when registering vehicles to ease the process at the vehicular emission tests and annual revenue license renewal. 

The gazette notification on this will be issued soon, the State Minister said.

He said according to the new process, each vehicle would have only one number, even when the ownership was switched between provinces. The persons who get vehicles from other provinces have to pay for the new number plates, according to the provinces, such as Western Province (WP) or Central Province (CP),” he said and added that to minimise the process involved, Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology too would be introduced to automatically identify and track vehicles.