Many times toll collecting companies wrongly collect fees from commuters. It can be due to errors in calculating, duplicate transactions, double charging and no-return journey despite payments. To ensure just transaction and commutation, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari in a return reply to the Lok Sabha said that any agency collecting fees for any of the above reasons will have to pay a penalty of up to 1500 times the fees to the user.
He further mentioned that NPCI(National Payment Corporation of India) which acts as the central clearing house for National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) has provided a refund in 12.55 lakh transactions in 2024, out of the total 410 crore FASTage transactions.
The penalties levied till now on the collecting agencies are up to 2 crore, and it is also reported that out of all the mistakes errors in fee collection accounted for most of it. He also highlighted that vehicles are also charged falsely when they have not even traveled on a national highway due to a mistake while entering the Vehicle Registration Number(VRN) manually in the system.
“The double charging sometimes happens due to multiple readings by FASTag readers. The penalty of Rs 1 lakh per case is levied on user fee collecting agencies to discourage manual VRN-based transactions,” Gadkari said.
Amidst this over 14 agencies have been debarred for over two years, and the ministry informed that their work will be transferred to new agencies by established authority under supervision. This exposes the lapses in roads and highway management in the country, which need attention and resolution from the authorities.
