Addressing the change of residence
It was unavoidable drudgery to get our address changed in official records upon shifting to our own house in Panchkula from the company-leased accommodation in Chandigarh, where we lived till my retirement in 2019. One by one, I got the details updated in the Aadhaar card, PAN card, voter card, bank passbooks, etc. The entire process entailed diligence as forms had to be filled and documents attached. Merely submitting applications, without a vigorous follow-up, didn’t suffice.
Realising later that I had forgotten to update the address in the Registration Certificate (RC) of my car, I set out to do the needful. What I presumed to be a routine exercise turned out to be a complex one with inter-state ramifications. Though Chandigarh and Panchkula are contiguous geographically, administratively the former is a UT and the latter falls in Haryana. This meant that after getting an NOC from Chandigarh, I needed to apply for registration afresh in Panchkula.
Several documents had to be submitted along with an application for NOC: pencil print of chassis number, a copy of the insurance, address proof, self-declaration, National Crime Records Bureau NOC, etc. After going through the rigmarole, I succeeded in securing the NOC from the UT. Next, I landed at the office of the Registering Authority in Panchkula for re-registration of my car. The dealing official scrutinised the RC and peered at his computer as if to confirm something. ‘The emission standard (BS3) of your car is obsolete; it cannot be registered in Haryana,’ he told me. Caught off guard, I pleaded that it was an old car for which an NOC had been issued for inter-state change of address. Brushing my plea aside, he asserted that BS3 vehicles, whether new or old, were no longer registered in Haryana. I was ‘advised’ to return to the Registration & Licensing Authority (RLA), Chandigarh, for NOC cancellation. Ironically, such vehicles ply freely on Haryana’s roads.
Willy-nilly, I drafted an application for NOC cancellation, citing refusal by the transferee state to consider the BS3 vehicle. All over again, I laboured to collate the documents which had to be annexed with the application. The documents included an affidavit declaring that the vehicle had not been misused during the period of validity of the NOC. A week after the submission of the application, I heaved a sigh of relief on finding the NOC tag removed and the RC’s status restored to ‘active’ on the portal. However, I wondered why the NOC had been issued in the first place; a careless lapse by the authorities had forced me to shuttle frantically between offices, as must be the case with countless others, to get my seemingly simple work done.
