Tuesday, August 31, 2004

No need to carry your driving license.

Today evening, as we were going towards the car parking area of college, my friend Saurabh snapped - “Oh shit! I forgot my license.”, “It’s OK. Nobody is gonna stop you midway and check your license” - I replied. But that was no reason to stop worrying as driving without license can be real dangerous (atleast in India). This little incident started a discussion between me and Saurabh which led us to a possible solution to this problem.

The sole purpose of carrying a driving license is that it’s the proof that you have passed your driving tests and obviously it’s not logical to carry your pass certificate everywhere you go. But if you do not carry the license how will the policeman know that you have passed the exam. Wait a moment. Why not let the policeman carry all our exam results? You think it’s funny! No it’s not. It’s Computer Science.

The first thing we do is create a centralized database of all the driving test results. The database is updated every time a person passes the exam or gets his/her license cancelled. This database consists of all the information on a normal driving license including a primary key. A primary key is a group of information about a person that establishes his uniqueness. For e.g. complete Name and Address, Telephone no. or even an Email Id. The primary key for different States/Countries must be chosen separately to suit their specific needs. Now all one needs is to remember his/her primary key and produce it whenever required (if someone can’t even remember his primary key, he better not drive).

Secondly we need to equip policeman with computers (it’s better to have specifically designed machine) with access to the database. The policeman inputs the primary key into the machine which searches the database for the key. The result contains all the stored information we talked about if the person identified with the primary key has passed his driving test. If the search fails I recommend the culprit to start praying :-).

What if someone tries to forge a primary key? Remember, the policeman also gets the photograph in the result which he can verify. I seriously doubt the existence of a perfect face recognition program in near future so it’s better to have the great human eyes do the job. The verification will be easier and better if users update their photograph in the database on a regular basis using some simple Web Service. This won’t be troublesome for users because I believe everyone will own handy digital cameras in years to come.

I really don’t see any reason why this solution to oops-i-forgot-my-license woes is not feasible. Probably, someone has thought of a similar scheme beforehand. Anyways, I’ll be really glad if I don’t have to keep my driving license with me all the time round.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's really a novel idea and high tech too. But do you think India can handle the cost of such a large scale implementation....

Anonymous said...

Its really a great idea.But to get this done will really take a giant's effort on our part(INDIANS).

Anonymous said...

Ya that's a great way to Rome without a license in INDIAN roads where u don’t know when u will be stopped by the THULLAS(cops) who in turn will help u in sharing ur money with them. So if we don’t want to pay them our money this a great way to start the things but to that IT guys like U an ME have to take the INITIATIVE .
frm
Punit Kainthola.

Anonymous said...

Amazing Idea. But difficult to maintain In India.

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messiah said...

I DONT THINK IT'S WORKS IN INDIA..Even in the developed countries ppl have to carry their licenses and other identity cards.
I appreciate this thinking but i feel that giveing a try itself makes the things worse. Last month when lt.governor suggested the system of social security no for ppl in india.He left with so many criticisms and repremands. And this system needs every traffic police man to carry a hardware which can access to the central database, which makes these whole policy a costlier any other ppl policies.
Nice thinking dudes..