Govt finalises new toll policy

Union Minister for Shipping, Road Transport and Highways TR Baalu has said the new toll policy has been finalised by the government, while the toll rules are under formulation.

Speaking at the conference of chief secretaries on 'Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in Infrastructure', organised by the Planning Commission on Saturday, Baalu said the government has also decided to shift to electronic toll collection (ETC).

There were differences between the ministry and the Planning Commission over certain toll-related issues mentioned in the draft policy, and till last week, these were still being discussed.

However, with the minister now officially announcing that toll rules are being formalised, the differences over the policy seem to have been sorted out.

He said for checking the cases of overloading, weigh-in motion bridges are being installed by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).

The minister disclosed that for real time traffic data collection, the Department of Road Transport and Highways is going to install 320 Automatic Traffic Counter-cum-Classifiers (ATCC) in the first stage at certain stretches of National Highways and finally, all the National Highways would be covered with ATCC.

Baalu pointed out that the technology for user fee collection needs to be upgraded at the earliest in a time-bound manner and the concepts like shadow tolling and congestion charging need to be examined for adoption in urban environment.

Regulatory mechanism and speedy dispute resolution mechanism need to be formulated early, the minister opined and said non-compliance or default for the payment fee needs to be controlled through an effective enforcement mechanism.