With the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) collecting tolls for almost 10,000 km of highways, it should now devise ways to charge toll rates according to the quality of service.
The toll policy allows for a formula that permits annual increase in toll charges, but there are no tracking parameters that could measure quality of service.
If the project owners — the NHAI and the road developer — do not pay heed to the users, they are bound get into trouble sooner or later. This is evident in the ongoing tussle involving the NHAI and DS Construction that operates the 28-km stretch connecting Delhi and Gurgaon.
It took stern action from the Punjab and Haryana High Courts — which took note of the perpetual traffic jams at the toll plaza and barred the road operator from collecting tolls for close to 20 days — for the project owners to realise that they cannot remain nonchalant to the inconvenience caused to users.
Intervention necessary
Though the final outcome is awaited, DS Construction has been forced to stop collecting toll during peak hours. While this does raise questions about risks for investors in road projects, an intervention was necessary given that DS Construction will be operating this road for another 10-11 years.
In fact, DS Construction has now agreed to take steps to ease traffic in an out-of-court settlement that it has entered into with the NHAI in another ongoing case in the Delhi High Court. They include steps to increase use of tags, reduce the charge of monthly tags to that of 40 trips from 60 trips, create reversible toll lanes in the middle, and change design such as by adding extra lanes, among others. They have also initiated a dialogue with the Haryana Government and the owner of a nearby commercial complex (Ambience Mall) to provide land for creating additional toll plazas and additional routes. Meanwhile, based on this experience the NHAI could start devising ways to prevent such public outrage.
To start with, toll rates could be linked to the wait time at the toll gates. A rudimentary mechanism has already been put in place for the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway after the Courts’ orders. So, whenever the wait time crosses 10 minutes, people have to be allowed to go through free. Vehicles beyond a white line on the road near the toll booth are not charged.
For every toll road, it is important to display measurable service parameters such as waiting time, accident-response time and road roughness near the toll plaza, says Parvesh Minocha, Managing Director, Feedback Ventures.
“You could print those minimum service deliverables at the back of toll receipts also, so that customers know what they are paying for. Additionally, surveys showing the level of adherence to such parameters should be displayed at the NHAI Web site for each toll road operator,” says Minocha. To deal with high traffic growth, road operators such as DS Construction could give incentives to users to move over to an electronic payment system. The Delhi Metro, for instance, provides a 10 per cent discount to its smart-card users and about 65 per cent of Delhi Metro commuters use the prepaid card.
DS Construction does not offer any discount to smart-card users for its flexi-pass. On the monthly duration smart-pass, it offers a discount according to the concession agreement without any option to carry over unused trips.
Shailesh Pathak, President, Srei Infrastructure Finance, cites the example of Attica Tollway in Greece that handles over 3 lakh vehicles on average every day, with rush hour traffic of nearly 6,000 vehicles/hour/direction.
Attica came up with loyalty programmes to increase the number of tag users, and it also conducts customer-satisfaction surveys to measure performance. “NHAI could conduct customer-satisfaction surveys for toll roads through independent consultants. It could incentivise the toll-road operators for good performance and could penalise them for consistently lower customer-satisfaction levels. The RFID tags that most vehicles would carry over the next 24 months should make this even simpler to implement,” says Pathak. He adds that non-tag users who get into the lane for tag users should also be penalised. “This is already being followed on the Delhi-Noida-Delhi toll bridge, in a public-private-partnership project (PPP) of the UP Government.”
After all, India has the largest number of ongoing PPP programmes in the road sector. It is important not to forget the “public” — who pay through tolls and fuel cess for the highways.