The Centre’s priority is to make highway travel easier, and is in the process of identifying projects where toll collection has become unviable, Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari has said.
Till date, 74 publicly funded tolls have been identified and out of those 61 shut down. Similarly, projects of investments less than ₹100 crore under public-private-partnership will also be shut down after addressing contractual obligations, says a Government press release quoting him.
Could ‘shadow toll’ be an alternative to save road users from paying high tolls? In this model, road users do not pay any user fee or toll, rather the concessionaire collects the revenue from the Government, say industry sourcesUser fee (toll) on over 15,000 km length/sections have been completed through publicly funded/BOT (annuity) mode, involving about 350 plazas.
A road sector report by CRISIL & PHD Chamber, released last week, said there is reluctance to pay toll by Indian commuters. The Indian population has not yet completely accepted the importance of tolls for the construction of roads and the improvement of service delivery.
There have been several instances where people backed by various political groups have opposed toll plazas.
Such instances have not only deteriorated the sentiment of the road developers, but have also affected service delivery within the sector.
Shadow tolling is one of the mechanisms that have been highly successful in European countries. Such a toll is collected in proportion to the number of vehicles using the road asset.
In such a mechanism, the Government may increase the road tax for the user or may impose cess on fuels such as diesel or petrol.
Shadow toll is also considered an effective way as the imposed cess on fuel is minimal since it gets distributed among all citizens purchasing the fuel. Also, the road traffic is not affected by high increase in the tolls.