One tag for all toll plazas

Very soon, you will be able to drive past toll plazas all over the country with just one tag affixed on your vehicle with an embedded chip. This will be a huge service to transporters as well as travellers. With the condition of highways improving, more and more people have begun to travel by road.

At the moment, the process of crossing the toll plaza is cumbersome and time-consuming. A traveller on the highway that connects Delhi with Mumbai has to cross around 20 toll plazas and has to therefore swap 20 different cards or dish out cash 20 times to complete the journey.

This will soon change as the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is planning to integrate the backend software of all toll plazas across the country. As of now, toll plazas are connected only to the central server at the authority’s headquarters in New Delhi but the different toll plazas are not integrated with each other.

NHAI has, as a pilot project, asked three concessionaires to install three different technologies for use of these tags by October 31. All the three systems will be tested for six months and the one that emerges the best will be installed at all plazas after that.

“All the three systems are equally advanced. We will just check the system for six months to find out which one works best under our conditions. That system will be installed across India,” said a NHAI official.

The three electronic tolling systems are active, passive and infrared. The active tolling system, in which the tag sends as well as receives signals, is being tested at the Gurgaon-Jaipur highway; the passive system, where the tag only sends signals, at the Panipat-Jalandhar highway; and the infrared system (it sends and receives signals on optical fibre) at the Surat-Dahisar highway.

“After the test, we plan to make at least one lane at every toll plaza across India electronic and we will keep on increasing it with time, depending on the necessity,” added the official.

Some analysts said that though electronic tolling is a good move as it will help decongest toll plazas and prevent leakages, NHAI should have gone for satellite tolling directly, at least on a few stretches. In this system, there are no toll plazas, and the tag connects with a central server through a satellite.