Check Vehicle Details Using Number Plate Or Registration Number | Check Vahan Owner Details | Parivahan Vehicle Details

You’ve probably seen situations in which a vehicle collides with another vehicle and the person at fault flees in fear of being fined or confronted by the owner of the other vehicle, or it might happen that you witness a road accident. If you managed to record a vehicle’s registration number in either case, you can report it to the authorities. But it is also possible that you can get your hand on the vehicle owner’s information by yourself as well. 

There’s this government portal called “VAHAN” where you can log in and check vehicle or Vahan details pretty easily. You can verify or check the vehicle’s details such as the owner’s name, registration date, model and manufacturer details, registration certificate status, etc. It can also come in handy when you need to file your stolen vehicle report, or if you have lost your vehicle documents. Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of how you can get a vehicle’s details by number plate or registration number. But before that, there are a few things to cover, which you must know about registration numbers and number plates.

What is the VAHAN Portal? (https://vahan.parivahan.gov.in)

VAHAN is simply an e-Governance application under the National Transport Project. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways came up with the VAHAN portal back in 2011 in collaboration with the National Informatics Centre. The ultimate goal was to provide a fully functional national vehicle registry. So, this way, every registered vehicle in India is listed on this portal online. Now with this portal, it wouldn’t take you days to find a vehicle’s details; you can just access that information at your fingertip with just a few clicks. 

The VAHAN portal’s database is about to hit the 30 crore mark in terms of vehicle registrations. As of now, July 2022, there are precisely 294,676,081 listed or registered with the VAHAN portal in India. The thing to keep in mind is that these nearly 30 crore vehicles include all sorts of vehicles such as cars, bikes, auto rickshaws, cabs, buses, and more. In short, VAHAN came into existence with the specific goal of collecting all information about motor vehicle registration certificates and driving licences from Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) and District Transport Offices (DTOs) across India.

Scenarios When You Need Vehicle/Vahan Owner Details?

  • If you get your vehicle stolen, the first thing you’ll need to do is to prove your ownership when you’re filing a report. And in this case, you can use this government portal to prove that you’re the owner of that stolen vehicle. 
  • As we already mentioned earlier, when you witness an accident like a crash on the road or something like that, you can note down the numbers of vehicles involved to report to the authorities. 
  • Another use case of the Vahan portal is when you have decided to buy a second-hand vehicle. This way, you can look up the number plate on the Vahan portal’s website to ensure that it’s the same person who’s selling this vehicle to you as mentioned on the Vahan portal as the owner of that vehicle. So yeah, you can avoid getting scammed or getting into any other trouble by using this government service. 
  • If you have lost your vehicle ownership documents and have been asked by the authorities to show them to you, the VAHAN portal can be very useful.
  • Similarly, there are many more use cases for the VAHAN portal. 

What is a vehicle’s registration number or number plate?

At first glance, a vehicle’s number plate may seem like a combination of a few English characters and numbers. But actually, a vehicle’s number plate/registration number consists of information about which part of India that particular vehicle belongs to. 

Here’s an example of a typical number plate: AB06CD 1234

Let’s talk about what these numbers and characters mean when put together on the number plate of a vehicle. 

AB

The first pair of characters can tell you which state or union territory it belongs to. For example, if you see “DL” at the beginning of a number plate, that means it is a vehicle registered in Delhi. For these first two alphabetical characters, the short form of state and union territory names are used. The government started using this method for registration numbers or number plates back in the 1980s. 

06

These numbers refer to the districts of a state. Consider these numbers as a district’s sequential numbers. There are Regional Transport Offices (RTO) located in each state and in each district. It’s because managing the registration process from one or even a few places would be a lot of work. 

CD

This is the third part of the sequence where you can find one, two, or even three alphabet characters. This demonstrates an RTO’s ongoing series (also known as a counter to the number of vehicles registered) and/or vehicle classification.

1234

The fourth component here is a number ranging from 1 to 9999 that is unique to each plate. When the four-digit number is exceeded, a letter is prefixed, followed by two letters, and so on. Usually, people like to buy their preferred numbers, which definitely cost way more than a normal registration number, these are called premium number plates.

Alright, now you know the structure of a registration number or number plate, it is time to look at how you can check a vehicle’s ownership and other details by simply using the Vahan portal. 

How to Check Vehicle Owner details with Number Plate on VAHAN Portal?

First of all, you don’t need to use any third-party services to get the vehicle details. There are so many of these services in the market today. They advertise to provide such details via SMS, email, or anything like that, but it’s totally unnecessary. Instead, just use Vahan’s official website and you’ll be good for the most part. Now let’s talk about how you can get a hand on a vehicle’s owner details with just the number plate. 

  • First things first, go to the URL mentioned below and create an account. You can use your mobile number and email ID to register on the VAHAN portal. 
  • URL: https://vahan.parivahan.gov.in/nrservices/faces/user/citizen/citizenlogin.xhtml
  • After the account creation, just log in to your account, and then navigate to “Check RC Status” in the main menu. 
  • Once you’re on the webpage where you can have a box to input a registration number or number plate, then just do that and click on the “Get RC Status” button. 
  • Now, you’ll be able to look at all the information related to that particular vehicle.

You won’t be able to extract full information such as the chassis number and engine number of the vehicle, but other than that, you’ll have full details about the vehicle. There are details listed, such as registration date, model of the vehicle, financier’s name, emission norms, etc., which can be pretty helpful for authorities to locate a vehicle’s owner. And there you have it, this is the right way to check a vehicle’s details just by using the number plate or registration number.