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Updated Jan. 27, 2026: An official audit released by India’s national auditor found that between April 2019 and March 2024, at least 29,154 driving tests in Odisha were recorded under a vehicle class that did not match the license category the applicant had applied for. The same report found thousands of traffic e-challans that were invalid because the cited offense was physically impossible for the registered vehicle. The findings appear in a performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General, or CAG, covering nine regional transport offices in the state.
A lakh in India’s number system equals 100,000. The CAG reviewed records from nine of Odisha’s 35 RTOs for the five-year period. Those RTOs conducted 9.86 lakh driving tests and issued 6.67 lakh licenses. Of the tests reviewed, 29,154 contained a vehicle-class mismatch. That is roughly 3 percent of all tests examined. The mismatch occurred in both directions: some applicants who wanted a four-wheeler license were tested on a two-wheeler, and some who wanted a two-wheeler license were tested on a four-wheeler.
The implication for road safety is significant. A driving test is supposed to prove the applicant can operate the kind of vehicle they will be allowed to drive. A car driver who has only been tested on a motorcycle has no verified experience with brakes, mirrors, or steering geometry of a car. A motorcycle rider who has been tested in a car may lack the balance and traffic awareness needed for two-wheeled riding. When the state issues a license based on a mismatched test, it puts both the license holder and other road users at risk.
The CAG also flagged duplicate licenses. The report states 318 licenses were issued to 158 individuals for different categories of vehicles. These people held more than one license because Sarathi, the government’s digital portal for driving licenses, did not validate whether an applicant already held a license for another vehicle class. Instead of combining categories into one record, the system allowed separate records to be created.
The Odisha government responded in June 2025, acknowledging that inspectors had recorded incorrect entries about the class of vehicle used during driving tests. It said these entry errors caused the discrepancies. But the audit’s duplicate-license finding points to a broader structural problem: an approved applicant can receive two licenses because the database lacks cross-checks.
Perhaps more revealing than the license mismatches are the faulty traffic tickets. The CAG compared data in VAHAN, the government’s vehicle-registration and challan portal, with e-challans issued from 2019 through 2024. The result: 2,988 two-wheeler riders were fined for not wearing seat belts, even though two-wheelers do not have seat belts. Fines in this group totaled Rs 29.88 lakh. At the other end of the dataset, 4,786 vehicles registered as three- or four-wheelers were fined for not wearing helmets. Fines in that group totaled Rs 47.86 lakh. Together, at least 7,774 challans were issued for offenses that could not have occurred based on the registered vehicle type, with total penalties of Rs 77.74 lakh, roughly $94,000 at current exchange rates.
These are not minor punctuation mistakes. A no-helmet ticket for a car and a no-seatbelt ticket for a motorcycle are tickets that no one should ever receive under India’s Motor Vehicles Act. The act sets the penalty for either violation at Rs 1,000 plus a three-month license disqualification. Some drivers may have been unnecessarily threatened with disqualification because of database errors.
The CAG’s explanation is clear: the e-challan system in VAHAN does not validate the offense against the registered vehicle class. That allows an enforcement official to enter an offense and generate a challan without the system rejecting the mismatch. The CAG said the errors indicated a “casual approach” by authorities while booking offenses and pointed to missing validation controls in both VAHAN and Sarathi.
For anyone outside India, the Odisha case is a useful reminder about digital government infrastructure. A database is only as trustworthy as its validation rules. In the United States, state DMVs do not let a driver take a Class D road test on a motorcycle and receive a passenger-car license. The records are tied to the vehicle class used in the exam. Similarly, computerized ticket systems in many jurisdictions are coded to flag an offense that does not apply to the vehicle type, such as a seatbelt violation on a motorcycle.
The difference between the U.S. and Odisha is not about the people doing the work; it is about the checks around the data. Without automated checks, even basic traffic enforcement can produce absurd results. The CAG’s recommendations are therefore relevant globally: enforce vehicle-class validation at the time of both licensing and challan generation, hold data-entry staff accountable, and audit enforcement data periodically for impossible entries.
In Odisha’s case, the corrective path has been described but not yet fully demonstrated. The state government has acknowledged the errors and attributed them to data-entry mistakes by motor vehicle inspectors. Going forward, the public will need to see that the Sarathi portal cannot issue a second license to a person who already holds one for a different class of vehicle. They will also need to see that VAHAN refuses to issue a challan for an offense the vehicle could not commit.
The report, covering April 2019 to March 2024, is a reminder that governance reforms are more than digitalization. Paper records can be mismatched, but digital records can be mismatched at scale, with software producing hundreds of thousands of errors per year. Odisha’s 29,154 wrong-vehicle tests show why validation controls matter.
