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Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has made a strong statement regarding toll charges on India’s highways, as he said that agencies should not collect tolls if the roads are not in good condition. This announcement was made during a global workshop on satellite-based tolling, a system set to be implemented across 5,000 km this financial year, reported PTI.
The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is planning to introduce a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system. This will be integrated within the current FASTag ecosystem, initially operating in a hybrid model that uses both Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-based ETC and GNSS-based ETC simultaneously.

“If you don’t provide good quality service, you should not charge toll,” Gadkari emphasized. “We are in a hurry to start tolling to collect user fees and protect our interest, but you should collect the user fee where you provide the best quality road. If you collect toll on roads with potholes and mud, then there will be a backlash from people,” added Gadkari.
The GNSS-based tolling system will first be implemented on commercial vehicles before being extended to private vehicles, taking scalability and privacy concerns into account. Additionally, the highway authority has suggested incorporating driver behavior analysis and back-end data analysis to detect and prevent fraud.
NHAI also mentioned that with the GNSS system, toll payments might shift from a prepaid to a postpaid model. This change could enable banks and financial institutions to offer faster credit based on travel plans.
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