Toll may be halved for 2-lane national highways undergoing expansion | India News

NEW DELHI: In yet another move to rationalise tolling on national highways (NHs), the road transport ministry has proposed to halve the toll during the expansion of 10-metre-wide two-lane highways with paved shoulders to four-lane highways. This has been proposed since commuters don’t get the desired service while construction work is underway on such stretches, with the highway width available for use being reduced.At present, the user fee for such stretches is 60 per cent of the normal toll for NHs, even during expansion phase, as they are narrow highways without dividers. If the proposal goes through and gets the green signal from the finance ministry, the user fee will go down to only 30 per cent of the normal toll during the construction phase.In the case of widening of four-lane highways to six lanes or expanding six-lane highways to eight lanes, the chargeable toll is capped at 75 per cent of the normal rate during the construction phase. This is also because commuters don’t get the desired service while work is underway on such stretches. This has also been a major issue, with there even being instances of courts taking note of the anomaly.The proposal to give relief to commuters using two-lane NHs with paved shoulders gains importance considering road transport minister Nitin Gadkari has announced a plan to convert 25,000 km of two-lane highways into four-lane highways with an investment of Rs 10 lakh crore in the next two years. The govt will be focusing over the next decade on the expansion of two-lane and two-lane with paved shoulders NH stretches, as nearly 80,000 km out of the total 1.46-lakh-km length of NHs fall under this category.Earlier, to provide relief to commuters, govt had announced the Rs-3,000 annual toll pass scheme, which will allow private vehicles to cross 200 toll plazas annually. More recently, it notified a new rule to reduce the toll rate by up to 50 per cent for structures such as bridges, tunnels, flyovers and elevated sections on highways, which will benefit commercial and heavy vehicles.