Union Ministry of Road Transportation and Highways declared that it is mandatory for all vehicles to have a FASTag from February 15th. Vehicles running without the FASTag will have to pay twice the toll amount. In a recent notification, MoRTH had announced to extend the deadline for FASTag from December 31st 2020 to February 15, 2021. But, now Nitin Gadkari, the Union Transport Minister said that the deadline extension would not happen further and urged all the vehicle owners to affix the e-payment facility on their vehicles as soon as possible.
FASTag is a type of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology which allows automatic toll collections. This is a very convenient and hassle-free service which saves a lot of time and improves the overall average speed of the Indian National Highways. In fact, the use of these FASTag stickers can also help reduce pollution as the vehicles need not stop at the toll plazas for long hours. Recently, the Indian Government started implementing the FASTag at airport parking to streamline and decongest the traffic flow. First, introduced in the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport and sources suggest that after implementation of this facility, resulted in shorter queues near the airport parking which is usually not the case. If everything goes well, soon the government will start to implement FASTag in all airport and shopping complex parking.
Getting a FASTag today, is probably one of the easiest jobs, all thanks to the digitalization of all the banking services. The customers have a choice to choose from all the major banks namely, SBI, ICICI, HDFC, Paytm and more which all are offering FASTags. After the process is complete, the bank will send a FASTag sticker which the customer needs to affix it to the windshield of the car.
Surely, RFID based toll collection was a long-awaited update to the Indian National Highways and now with the introduction, we can expect our highway trips to be more enjoyable and fun rather than spending time in the long toll plaza queues. The FASTag collection today stands at INR 80 crore and with more and more vehicles getting added to the Indian roads, the amount will likely grow much more in the future.