Kamal Ghorui
New Delhi: NHAI has refunded toll charges in 17.7 lakh cases between Jan and Dec 2025 for incorrect deductions and in nearly 35% of these cases, the vehicles were not at the toll plaza when the user fee was debited from FASTag wallet.Considering that such transactions happen due to manual entry of vehicle details by toll operators because of some issue, the road transport ministry is mulling doing away with this option completely.In a written reply, Union road transport minister Nitin Gadkari informed the Lok Sabha Thursday that National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), which provides the Central Clearing House (CCH) services of electronic toll collection, “has reported 17.6 lakh transactions where refunds were made due to incorrect user fee (toll) deductions from Jan-2025 to Dec-2025 out of a total of 464 crore FASTag transactions”. This is barely 0.03% of all FASTag transactions.An official said, “Though the number of faulty transactions is miniscule, this shouldn’t happen. A decision will be likely taken soon on stopping the practice of manually feeding vehicle registration numbers in the system to deduct toll. In such cases, there is a possibility of the toll attendants noting down wrong details. This becomes an unnecessary hassle for commuters.”The ministry said that with the implementation of FASTag, the average time taken to cross toll plaza has reduced to 40 seconds compared with the earlier 12.2 minutes per vehicle under the manual tolling system.In a separate written reply to a question on the total toll collection, the road transport ministry said in the past three quarters of the financial year 2025-26, Rs 50,195 crore was collected as user fee across the national highway and expressway network. During the entire last financial year, Rs 61,508 crore was collected as toll, the ministry further said.
