Kherki Daula toll plaza to experiment with digital payments

The concessionaire of the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway on Monday said that they will be experimenting with full-fledged digital payment from Tuesday onwards for couple

The concessionaire of the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway on Monday said that they will be experimenting with full-fledged digital payment from Tuesday onwards for couple of hours daily on the Kherki Daula toll plaza in the run-up to January 1, when all toll plazas controlled by the National Highways Authority of India(NHAI) will accept only online payments through Fastags.

HT Image

Millennium City Expressway Private Limited(MCEPL), the highway concessionaire, said that around 80 percent commuters already pay online and that they expect the number to hit 96 percent by next month. There are 24 Fastag lanes and two cash lanes at the present at the toll plaza.

Suraj Bhardwaj, chief executive officer, MCEPL said that from Tuesday onwards they will be accepting only online payments through Fastags for a couple of hours at Kherki Daula toll plaza as this would serve as an experiment for the digital-only payments from January 1. “There are minor issues which will be resolved but we are fully ready to face the situation. From Tuesday onwards, for a couple of hours, all 26 lanes will accept only digital payments. We have changed RFID readers, installed new ones and have also deployed a large number of hand-held machines to ensure there is no delay in payments,” he said.

Bhardwaj, however, said that they are preparing for the digital payments from January 1 onwards and they have been experimenting to ensure that the teething problems are resolved. “The one problem that is expected to hinder the smooth movement of traffic is that the new Smartags, which are currently being issued, have quality issues and despite the presence of new tag readers, there are technical glitches. We will deploy more personnel to resolve the issues,” he said.

The NHAI said that with Fastag becoming mandatory from January 1, the authority has updated its mobile application, called My FASTag App, with a new feature which would enable commuters to check their balance status by simply entering the vehicle number. This feature will help Fastag users to verify the tag status of the vehicle during their passage through a toll lane in case the status has not been updated in the toll plaza server due to any technical reason. This new feature will help both the commuter and the toll operator to check the tag balance status on a real-time basis and eliminate the problem of disputed status.

“The authority has also reduced the refresh time limit of blacklisted tags from existing 10 minutes to three minutes, to expedite update of the status in the rolling system and show the current status in the app for a seamless passage,” said an NHAI spokesperson.