Yvonne Webb

Trans­port Com­mis­sion­er Wayne Richards said there will be no rush to change, re­call or with­draw the new dri­ver's per­mit af­ter re­ports sur­faced yes­ter­day that a hum­ming bird used in the de­sign was not in­dige­nous to T&T.

Richards said the holo­gram on the re­cent­ly re­leased dri­ving per­mit which re­sem­bles a hum­ming bird was not an er­ror but a de­lib­er­ate de­sign. "We are mere­ly cre­at­ing an il­lu­sion to baf­fle peo­ple who are think­ing it is one thing but it is re­al­ly some­thing else," Richards said in re­sponse to crit­i­cism on so­cial me­dia that the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port would have erred in its de­sign.

"We know what we are do­ing. We did not make an er­ror," he said. Last Fri­day, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan launched the new dri­ving per­mit which is em­bed­ded with en­hanced se­cu­ri­ty fea­tures aimed at im­prov­ing ser­vice de­liv­ery and pro­ce­dures at the li­cens­ing di­vi­sion and pre­vent­ing du­pli­ca­tion.

How­ev­er, so­cial me­dia users crit­i­cised the Min­istry's use of what ap­pears to be an Amer­i­can species of hum­ming bird rather than one which is in­dige­nous to T&T on a na­tion­al doc­u­ment. Sinanan said he was aware of so­cial me­dia posts and had sought clar­i­fi­ca­tion from the Li­cens­ing Of­fice. He re­ferred queries to Richards. Richards said that in the past dri­ving per­mits were eas­i­ly tam­pered with and forged, with re­ports of it be­ing done in as far as Grena­da.

He said it was agreed that spe­cial se­cu­ri­ty ef­fects were re­quired to make the dri­ver's per­mits less vul­ner­a­ble to du­pli­ca­tion and this spe­cif­ic de­sign was con­cep­tu­alised. "We can­not di­vulge some of these se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures. What I can tell you is that peo­ple are see­ing and de­ter­min­ing what they want to see. What this tells us is that we have achieved our se­cu­ri­ty goal and it strength­ens the per­mit."

With re­spect to the holo­graph­ic bird, he said, "there is some­thing that ap­pears to be a bird. It isn't that we iden­ti­fied a par­tic­u­lar bird or species. It has spe­cial se­cu­ri­ty ef­fects." Sim­i­lar­ly, he said the bar code on the per­mit does not con­vey per­son­al in­for­ma­tion, but some­thing else when scanned.

"Out­side of what would have been shown at the launch, there are many oth­er spe­cial se­cu­ri­ty mech­a­nisms, for in­stance when you move it in a cer­tain di­rec­tion it changes colour. "I am hap­py to know we are keep­ing peo­ple baf­fled. Gone are the days when the Trans­port Com­mis­sion was op­er­at­ing "vai-que-vai". We are now stand­ing up to be the best di­vi­sion of the gov­ern­ment."