From December 1, all cars to be rolled out with toll FASTags

FASTags work mainly through radio-frequency identification (RFID) strips pasted on windscreens for contact-less passage in toll plazas on national highways. Users can recharge FASTags online.

All cars sold or manufactured on or after December 1 will have to be rolled out with “FASTags”, the government’s electronic toll collection product, fitted in them.

FASTags work mainly through radio-frequency identification (RFID) strips pasted on windscreens for contact-less passage in toll plazas on national highways. Users can recharge FASTags online.

RFID strips will now have to be pasted on vehicles by manufacturers or dealers if the vehicles have already left the factories. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways under Nitin Gadkari issued a gazette notification to enable this, amending the relevant sections of the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989, on Thursday. In case of vehicles sold as “drive away chassis without windscreen”, FASTag will have to be fitted by the vehicle owner before it is registered, the notification said.

The move takes away the need for vehicle owners to buy the tags as they will now come with the car.

Across the national highways network, National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has 371 toll plazas where FASTags will work. From September this year, at least one lane in each toll plaza has been dedicated to FASTag users. Over 6 lakh FASTags are currently in circulation. In 2016-17, Indian auto-makers produced 37,91,540 four-wheelers.

The government has been pushing cashless, digital toll collection especially since demonetisation. Currently, electronic toll collection has swelled to over Rs 200 crore per month, and is expected to jump significantly post December, a ministry official said.

In August this year, the Indian Highways Management Company Limited, under the NHAI that runs the FASTags product, introduced a mobile app for recharging toll tags. It has also started delivering the tags to customers’ doorsteps.