New Bharat Series 'BH' mark for vehicle registration: All you need to know

The Centre introduced a new vehicle registration mark called the Bharat series or 'BH' in all vehicles this week, a move aimed to ease the process of transferring registration of vehicles when a vehicle owner moves within the country.

The new series will not require any transfer of registration and will be valid throughout India. The BH series is available on a voluntary basis to Defense, central and state government employees. Those working for private companies which have offices in four or more states can also use this facility.

A vehicle bearing the BH series mark will not require the assignment of a new registration mark when the owner transfers to a new state.

The format of the registration is YY BH #### XX, where YY stands for year of first registration, BH is the code for Bharat series, #### is a randomised number between 0000 and 9999 and XX are letters from the alphabet.

Under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, an owner cannot keep his vehicle in a state other than the one where it was registered for more than a year. The owner needs to get a new registration from the respective state's authority within this time frame. The owner also has to produce a no-objection certificate for the assignment of new registration in another state and pay the road tax on a pro-rata basis.

With the new law, people having jobs with a high transfer rate will benefit the most as they will be saved from this hassle.