What is Sarathi?

Sarathi is the national application behind driving licences in India, run by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways as part of Parivahan Sewa. Every licence issued by any RTO in the country is recorded in it.

It is the licence counterpart to Vahan. Vahan holds vehicles, Sarathi holds drivers, and the two are separate systems that happen to sit behind the same Parivahan front door. Applications for a learner licence, a permanent licence, a renewal, a duplicate or the addition of a vehicle class all run through Sarathi.

For a fleet, the useful part is not the application workflow but the record: a licence number and a date of birth are enough to confirm whether a licence is real, current, and valid for the class of vehicle the driver is about to be put in.

A licence lookup returns the facts that decide whether a driver is legal to dispatch:

• Whether the licence number exists at all, which is the first thing a forged card fails.
• Validity dates, separately for transport and non-transport entitlements. These expire on different schedules and a driver can be current on one and lapsed on the other.
• The classes of vehicle the holder is authorised to drive, such as LMV, HMV, HGMV or a transport endorsement.
• The issuing RTO and the licence status, including whether it has been suspended or disqualified.

Personal details are masked, in the same way Vahan masks owner details. You are confirming a licence, not pulling a background file.

Expiry is the check everyone runs and the class is the one that gets missed. A licence can be perfectly valid and still not cover the vehicle the driver is handed.

The common failure is a driver holding a light motor vehicle entitlement being put on a heavy goods vehicle. The card looks current, the date is fine, and the entitlement is wrong.

That distinction is not administrative. An accident involving a driver operating outside the class on their licence is where insurers decline claims, because the vehicle was being driven by someone not authorised to drive it. The licence being unexpired is no defence.

A single check is manual: open mParivahan or the Sarathi service on parivahan.gov.in, enter the licence number and date of birth, and read the result.

That does not survive contact with a real fleet. Fifty drivers checked by hand once at onboarding is a one-off exercise, not a control, because licences expire continuously after the day you checked them.

The Sarathi API is what turns it into a control. Licences are re-checked on a schedule rather than at hire, so an expiry surfaces before dispatch rather than at a check-post. That is what our driver verification runs against.

They are confused constantly, including by people who use both weekly.

Vahan answers questions about a vehicle: RC status, fitness, insurance, PUC, permit, pending challans. Sarathi answers questions about a person: licence validity, authorised classes, licence status.

A complete pre-dispatch check needs both, because a compliant truck driven by an unlicensed driver and a licensed driver in a non-compliant truck are stopped at the same check-post for different reasons. See what Vahan is and the Vahan portal services guide.

• "No record found" usually means the licence number was entered in the wrong format rather than that the licence is fake. Formats vary by state, and older licences digitised during migration are the most likely to be missing.
• The date of birth must match the record exactly, and a mismatch returns nothing rather than an error explaining why.
• A licence issued very recently may not appear immediately, because the record propagates from the issuing RTO.
• Portal availability is uneven, particularly at month end. This is the usual reason a manual check "does not work" on a given afternoon.