Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said Wednesday said the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has floated a request for a proposal to implement barrier-free tolling on Dwarka Expressway, which connects Delhi’s Dwarka to Gurgaon in Haryana.
Gadkari shared the information while answering questions in Rajya Sabha about whether the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) proposes to construct or convert the existing toll plazas into unmanned toll plazas in the country and the toll plazas selected at the initial level for the conversion. The Union minister said that it has been decided to first implement a barrier-free Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) system with available technology and existing fee plaza infrastructure at selected sections of National Highways (NH).
“Request for Proposal (RFP) to implement the barrier-free tolling system on the project Dwarka Expressway has been invited/floated, with the possibility of implementing it on other fee plazas in a phased manner depending upon the outcomes and efficacy of the implementation on the Dwarka Expressway,” he said.
On the expenditure to be incurred on the project, Gadkari said it is expected that the cost of running a physical user fee plaza could be lowered by using a barrier-free user fee collection system.
The 29-km-long Dwarka Expressway — 18.9 km (lengthwise) in Haryana and the remaining 10.1 km in Delhi — starts from Shiv-Murti on National Highway 8 and ends near the Kherki Daula toll plaza. The Gurgaon portion was thrown open after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it in March this year. The project, which is being built at the cost of about Rs 10,000 crore, is currently proposed to connect Sector 21 in Dwarka to NH-8 passing through Sectors 88, 84, 83, and 99-113 in Gurgaon along with the proposed Global City, before ending at NH-8 ahead of the Kherki Daula toll plaza.
This comes on the heels of the ministry’s amendment in July this year of the National Highways Fee (Determination of Rates and Collection) Rules, 2008, to include provisions relating to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based electronic toll collection. GNSS will allow toll or highway user fees to be collected without stopping the vehicle at a toll booth boom barrier for the FASTag barcode to be read.
According to MoRTH, as of March 2024, more than 98 per cent of user fee payments at toll plazas were being made through FASTag. The toll is collected for approximately 45,000 km of National Highways and expressways through 1,200 toll plazas maintained by NHAI or concessionaires.
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