Nikita Vashisht
Moneycontrol News
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is likely to implement the decision to charge toll amount only for the distance traveled by a commuter merely on expressways in India and not highways.
An official from NHAI told Moneycontrol that the decision to charge toll amount corresponding to distance traveled may not be pan-India and could be restricted to expressways initially.
“Whether the decision will be for all highways or not is not sure, but it will definitely be for expressways,” he said.
The maiden exercise shall be carried out on Eastern Peripheral Expressway (EPE), the 135-kilometer e’way circling around Delhi, which will be inaugurated by Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, on April 29 followed by Delhi-Mumbai expressway.
The EPE and other expressways shall be fitted with GPS devices to calculate the distance traveled by a vehicle. The tolling system will use FASTag to sense the movement of the vehicles which would enable automatic deduction of toll charges.
Also read: PM Modi to inaugurate Eastern Peripheral E-way this month: Nitin Gadkari
A FASTag is a radio-frequency identification (RFID) enabled tag attached to the vehicle’s windscreen. It is linked to a prepaid bank or mobile wallet account from which the amount is mechanically deducted.
Officials believe that collecting toll for the distance travelled will not impact overall toll collections of NHAI which currently stand at approximately Rs 65,000 crore per day. This includes toll collections done by NHAI and projects under BOT (build-operate-transfer).
“The scheme is unlikely to negatively impact toll collections. Rather, we expect them to improve… After doing all the permutation and combination, we have realised that it will help us collect toll from all the vehicles entering expressways, in between, through interchanges,” another official from NHAI said.
He said that earlier people were paying amount for the entire stretch irrespective of the fact whether they were travelling the corresponding length or not. Now, this will be a relief for commuters travelling lesser distance.
Cabinet committee on economics affairs had approved construction of 1,000 km of expressways under National Highways Development Project (NHDP) phase-VI in November last year. The expressways are to be constructed as per design, build, finance, operate and transfer (DBFOT) method.
As per the cabinet decision, eight stretches namely Vadodara-Mumbai, Delhi-Meerut, Bangalore-Chennai, Delhi-Jaipur, Delhi-Chandigarh, Kolkata-Dhanbad and Delhi-Agra were decided. EPE was kept out of the ambit of NHDP.
Apart from the above mentioned expressways, union ministry of road transport and highways decided to prepare detailed project report (DPR) for five other expressways including Delhi- Katra (via Ludhiana), Hyderabad-Vijayawada-Amravathi (HVA), Nagpur-Hyderabad-Bengaluru (NHB), Kanpur-Lucknow and ring road at Amravathi.
The scheme of “pay as you use” as mooted by finance minister, Arun Jaitley, while presenting union budget for 2018-19.
“Number of FASTags has gone up from about 60,000 in December 2016 to more than 10 lakh now. From December 2017, all class 'M' and 'N' vehicles are being sold with only with the FASTags. The government will come out with a policy to introduce toll system on 'pay as you use' basis,” Jaitley had said.
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