Kavrepalanchok. Around 9,000 QR code driving licenses have been printed at the security printing centre at Panauti municipality-5 in the last two months.

According to the Department of Transport Management, 8,983 licenses have been printed since the printing of licenses began at the centre on November 7.

The printing of the department’s mass printer, which was halted after vandalism during the Genji agitation, has been started from this center.

Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Jagadish Kharel, inaugurated the printing of licenses by pressing a button at the printing press on November 7.

An agreement was signed between the Centre and the Department on November 26 for the printing of licenses. According to the plan, the Centre has to provide 12 lakh units of licenses to the Department within six months.

A total of 8,983 licenses were printed in the last two months, said IT Director at the Department, Keshav Khatiwada. According to him, the department has given the responsibility to the center to print 12 lakh copies of the license. According to him, around 30 lakh licenses are yet to be printed, including those who have passed the new trial and applied for renewal.

“Only the essential licenses have been printed and seven thousand out of nine thousand licenses have been distributed,” Khatiwada said.

The department is preparing to print general licenses. Khatiwada said that 1 lakh data is being sent at once.

The Centre has set a target to print the remaining 11.91 lakh smart cards within the next two months. Executive Director of the Centre, Devraj Dhungana, said that although the work seems to be slow so far, the pace would be intensified from the next mid-January. “The initial phase was a trial period and only a small amount of printing was done, and the work will be expedited with the addition of new human resources from a week,” he said. According to him, internal preparations are underway to print 10,000 smart licenses daily from January.

In the first two weeks, 520 licenses printed at the centre were handed over to the department. According to Dhungana, the license was handed over to the Department after the successful test conducted in the lab of Nepal. As per the agreement, 12 lakh licenses will be printed at the rate of one lakh in the first three months and 9 lakh in the remaining three months.

QR codes have been used instead of chips in the cards printed by the center. According to the center, it has a high-level security system. The new card will have six layers of security technology. The card will have 34 security features with some visible and some invisible. The Centre is also preparing to print postal stamps, citizenship, excise duty stickers, land ownership certificates and visa stickers besides the license.

Earlier, two highly secure digital machines brought from Iraq had printed samples of the excise stickers. At present, the two machines will be able to print 60 million excise duty stickers annually. The press is expected to save Rs 10 billion annually in the form of safe printing. Around 1,000 human resources including 200 technicians will be required for the centre.

The government had prepared a work-oriented and result-oriented master plan in 2080 BS to develop the security printing system in three phases. In the first phase, Nepal will be made self-reliant within five years and in the second phase, reliable service and quality security materials related to security printing will be made available to SAARC and South-East Asian countries within the next ten years. In the third phase, a strategy has been set to provide reliable security printing services and quality security goods to the rest of the third countries within the next 15 years.

The Information Technology Park (IT Park) was converted into a security printing centre five years ago after the physical infrastructure was lying idle. Spread over 257 ropanis of land, the park consists of two big commercial administrative buildings, four well-equipped residential buildings and a godown.