After FASTags, implemented years back by the central government the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways are out with yet another plan for toll collection on the government-run highways.
The BJP-led government is moving ahead with a new plan to remove all the toll plazas in the country and switch to a mechanism of automatic number plate readers that will read the number plates plying through and will deduct the toll directly from the linked bank account of the registered vehicle number.
A pilot scheme for which is underway, besides the progress of legal works required for the scheme to be grounded. The details were given by Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari.
Gadkari went on to explain, “In 2019, we made a rule that cars will come with company-fitted number plates. So, the vehicles that have come in the last four years have different number plates. Now, the plan is to remove toll plazas and put cameras, which will read these number plates and toll will be deducted from the account directly. We are also doing a pilot of this scheme."
With mentioning the level of concern around Gadkari said, "however, there is one problem — there is no provision under the law to penalize the vehicle owner who skips the toll plaza and does not pay. We need to bring that provision under the law. We may bring in a provision for cars that do not have these number plates to get them installed within a certain period of time. We will need to bring in a Bill for this.”
At present about 97 percent of the total toll collected which stands near 40, 000 crores is done through FASTags, whereas, and the remaining 3% pay slightly more than the normal toll tax for not using FASTags.
The government earlier had released data marking the efficiency with the advent of FASTags. The data said it takes a vehicle approximately 47 seconds to cross a vehicle through the toll lane which makes the 260 vehicles crossing through the lane in an hour whereas the number earlier was far below at 112 when things proceeded in a manual manner.
The reason behind launching the FASTags mechanism was to ensure less congestion but the problem persisted as there were still existing gates to pass through the authentication. FASTags were made mandatory in the country back on February 16th, 2021.
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The problem that had with FASTags which still remains is the vehicle passing through the FASTags enabled lane with low balance in their ID, which eventually took more time due to poor internet connectivity, low server, human errors poor functioning of RFID, and processing time.
Now with a new plan to roll out after fixing all the issues in prevalence, the government had marked its positives by saying the automatic number plate reader (ANPR) the traffic congestion in the toll lane will be less and thus will ensure the smooth flow of the commuters.
A person associated with the visionary project of the center on the condition of anonymity said, “The ANPR camera is accustomed to reading nine numbers of the number plate and, if there is anything beyond that like something written on the number plates that we typically come across in most vehicles in the country the camera will not be able to read it.” He went on to say that there is an urgency of meeting these needs that are ahead of us before rolling out even in a phased manner.
Corroborating the concerns he added the tests have shown that the camera misses out about 10 number plates in 100 tested because they had more than 9 texts on it.
The official was of the view that such systems in a country like India can be rolled besides an alternative method such as FASTags or the GPS toll in order to compensate for its inefficiency with minimal loss in revenue.