India Driving Licence OCR API

What Makes the Indian driving licence Hard to Parse

The Indian driving licence is issued by the Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) of each state, with records held in the national Sarathi system. Indian driving licence numbers combine a state code, an RTO code, the year of issue and a serial number (for example MH01 20190012345), and the same number may be printed with or without spaces and hyphens. Layouts differ between states and between older laminated cards and newer smart cards, and classes such as MCWG and LMV are often listed with their own validity.

One API Call, Named Fields

The StructOCR Driver License OCR API returns the licence number, the holder's name, date of birth, father's or guardian's name where printed, address, issue and validity dates and vehicle classes. Indian cards print dates as DD-MM-YYYY; the API returns them as YYYY-MM-DD. Send a JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF as Base64 JSON or as a multipart upload; there is no SDK to embed in your app, although official Python and Node.js SDKs are available. Step-by-step code is in the Python guide. Usage is billed per successful scan with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Where Teams Use It in India

Integration & AI Prompts

Install the official SDK and pass a photo of the licence. Full request and response details are in the driver license API reference.

# pip install structocr
import os
from structocr import StructOCR

client = StructOCR(api_key=os.environ["STRUCTOCR_API_KEY"])
result = client.scan_driver_license("licence.jpg")

if result.get("success"):
    data = result["data"]
    print(data["document_number"], data["surname"], data["date_of_expiry"])

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "type": "drivers_license",
    "country_code": "IND",
    "region": "MH",
    "document_number": "MH0120190012345",
    "personal_number": null,
    "surname": "SHARMA",
    "given_names": "RAHUL",
    "sex": null,
    "date_of_birth": "1990-08-15",
    "place_of_birth": null,
    "date_of_issue": "2019-05-02",
    "date_of_expiry": "2039-05-01",
    "date_of_first_issue": null,
    "issuing_authority": null,
    "address": "FLAT 4, SAMPLE ROAD, MUMBAI 400001",
    "vehicle_class": "MCWG, LMV"
  }
}