Travails with the RTO

One of the tasks on my agenda is to get myself a drivers' license(!) and car registration. What happened was, in Jan 05, I lost my wallet and with it, my drivers' license and registration (both from AP). Negotiating with the RTO (Regional Transport Office) is formidable task for a honest person with an even slightly unusual situation, so I didn't make any progress for a long while. However now that I have more time on my hands -- time to tackle it. My situation is this messy, complex one involving the Hyderabad RTO and Bangalore RTO and some degree of past negligence on my part, simultaneously being without license and registration, trying to do things the straight way and so on. Its not clear where to start to resolve this Gordian knot. However I made a minor breakthrough with discovering an organization called the Automotive Association of South India. This is like the AAA in the US, and among other things, also helps you in negotiating the maze of the RTO. The RTO is very difficult to deal with on your own. The normal brokers who help you are pretty unsatisfactory. They tend to be unsavory looking characters, whose chief skill is bribing their way through the RTO. The AASI on the other hand is an organization with a long and illustrous history, a really nice old-fashioned wood and high-ceiling office off MG Road, and pleasant sensible people who know English. Perfect for me. So I've started with them. Getting the drivers' license should be reasonably easy as the RTO allows you to get one without a driving test if you have a foreign license, which I do. However they do force you to take a written test to get a Learners' License first. I could bypass the step for a 1500/- but I desisted and took the test. The test is a real mess. The test consists of 15 multiple choice questions that are to be answered in 15 minutes. 10 on 15 is a pass. There are several different versions of the question paper, so that people in the exam hall generally get all different question papers. There is no manual for preparation although the shops around the RTO will sell a couple of booklets that are somewhat helpful. If you study the booklets well, you can get around 5 of the 15 questions easily. The remaining questions are: a.) complicated by horrible english so you could muff even a simple question because of erroneous interpretation of the question b.) random stuff that you would never know c.) absolutely stupid questions that make you want to wring somebody's head. So far I've taken this test 4 times :-). In a earlier attempt last year to get a driving license, I took it twice before managing to pass it. The same happened this time too, first time around I got 7 on 15 and then second time 13 on 15. The questions are so frustrating that I didn't feel that I had done the second attempt any better than the first and yet I did a lot better. Anyway, all this nonsense has prompted an attempt to fight back. I've put as many questions as I can remember on my website: here. Its a little rough at this point, hope to clean it up. I did some websearches earlier but didn't find anything on the web about taking this test, so time to make a start. Hopefully this page will help other people, and even better, people will send in more questions so that (AGRE style) we would have this test completely cracked.
Ahem, there are also Google ads in a vain attempt to ...

Re. the permanent license, when I'm back from Timbaktu I have to go back to the RTO to get my photo taken and stuff, and that should be it ... with luck.