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Centre to remove toll plazas from all national highways: Report
The union ministry of road transport and highways' plan is remove all the toll plazas on the national highways and rely on Automatic Number Plate Reader (ANPR) cameras.
The Narendra Modi government is mulling to remove toll plazas and replace them with cameras which will read number plates. The union ministry of road transport and highways' plan is remove all the toll plazas on the national highways and rely on Automatic Number Plate Reader (ANPR) cameras, union minister Nitin Gadkari told The Indian Express in an interview.
Gadkari said that the government made a rule in 2019 that all the cars will have company-fitted number plates. “Now, the plan is to remove toll plazas and put cameras, which will read these number plates and toll will be deducted from the account directly,” he told the website.
What exactly is the government's plan for removing the toll plazas and replacing it with ANPR cameras? Here are five points to explain it.
1. According to the report, the cameras will read the vehicle number plates and automatically deduct toll fee from the bank accounts of the vehicle owners. The entries and exits of the toll roads will have these cameras installed.
2. A big question arises whether all the number plates can be read by these cameras. The answer is that only those number plates that have come after 2019 will be registered by these cameras.
3. As mentioned by Gadkari, the Centre had made a rule making it compulsory for the vehicles to have company-fitted number plates.
4. The government plans to come up with a scheme to replace older number plates in the process, the report said.
5. The minister said that a pilot of this scheme is underway and legal amendments to facilitate this transition are also being carried out to penalise the owners who don't pay the toll fees.
