Kolhapur police bust counterfeit HSRP number plate shop

Kolhapur: The Kolhapur police busted an unauthorised unit where counterfeit HSRP number plates were being made and sold to vehicle owners at Rs 500 per plate.Constable Navnath Kadam got information that, in a radium arts shop run by a man named Santosh Yadav in Sajani village of Hatkanangle tehsil, HSRP number plates were being manufactured and sold to vehicle owners, with claims that there would be no issue with the number plate.A team of police personnel, led by inspector Sushant Chavan, searched the shop on Wednesday. The police arrested Yadav, the 31-year-old owner of the radium arts shop."We got the embossing machine, file heater machine, final number plates totalling 33, the raw material, a paper roll with INDIA written on it, and a die totalling Rs 4 lakh. Manufacturing and selling HSRP number plates is illegal. The vehicle owner has to register on the website, and govt places an order with the registered vendor to make the number plate. We are investigating where the accused got the information, how he arranged for the machinery, and how many vehicle owners he sold the fake number plates to," said Chavan.It requires around Rs 1,000 to get the number plates for vehicles from authorised centres. Every HSRP number plate has a laser-etched code in it, which acts as a digital identifier, linking the vehicle with the database of the RTO.