FASTag collection policy will offer the best value to highway users

Over the past years, motorists have become used to spending at least 15-20 minutes crossing a user-fee plaza on national highways. Some past studies have assessed that the nation loses about ₹60,000 crore annually in terms of fuel and time loss due to the waiting time at the user-fee plazas.

With this backdrop, it is imperative for the government to work towards taking steps to reduce the time taken to cross a user-fee plaza. A prudent solution to the problem involved adopting technology, which reduced the waiting time and allowed the vehicle to pass through without stopping. Some potential technologies in the area that were evaluated include traditional swipe-based credit with a transaction time of 40 seconds, near-field communication (NFC) cards with transaction time of 12 seconds, and radio frequency-based cards (RFID) which takes 3-4 seconds.