The Traffic Department of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) is moving to digitalise the learner driver programme and beginning April, some candidates will be able to sit the examination online and their results will be available immediately after.
Traffic Chief, Senior Superintendent Ramesh Ashram, made this disclosure yesterday morning at the first National Road Safety Stakeholders forum.
According to Ashram, as of now the new system will only be available to candidates who purchase their packages from Traffic Headquarters.
“So as from the next exam come April, those who purchased [their] package from Traffic Headquarters, the exam will be electronic where you will go to the Police Training School and you do the exam on the
computer and you have the result right away,” he explained.
He indicated that the system will be rolled out across all regions once the necessary equipment becomes available. “Those areas when we get the system up then…we are starting with traffic headquarters.”
In March 2020, the GPF Traffic Department had suspended all learner-drivers theoretical classes following the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. As a result, those who had registered to attend classes for the months of March and April, 2020 were asked to check with the various offices to have their classes rescheduled.
The purchase of packages resumed on January 15 of this year followed by the theoretical classes.
In his address at the opening ceremony of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) Annual Officers Conference, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Ag) Calvin Brutus had said the digitalisation of the theoretical driving examination will mitigate against complaints of corruption and delays in marking of examination scripts.
“This is based on analysis of the investigations done by the Office of Professional Responsibility touching the issue of corruption in the drivers’ licences process which revealed that frequent and close contact during the tutorial sessions serve as opportunity for enticement,” he said.
“We have already tested the system with good results, drafted the regulations to guide the implementations, prepared the demonstration video to be online on our platform soon, digitised all the written materials, and we are now preparing the video-audio lectures to cover the topics that we currently lecture to tutorials by the traffic department,” he outlined.
Arrangements will also be in place where payment for the packages can be made via MMG.
