The Government on Friday announced extending the date to December 15 for making FASTag mandatory for toll payments on national highways. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways had earlier announced that from December 1, toll payments on highways would be accepted through FASTags only.
“To facilitate sufficient lead time to citizens to obtain FASTag, it has now been decided that all the lanes in the Fee plazas shall be declared as ‘FASTag lane of Fee Plaza’ by December 15, 2019,” a Ministry of Road Transport and Highways communication said. The National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) programme, the flagship initiative of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, has been implemented on a pan-India basis in order to remove bottlenecks and ensure seamless movement of traffic and collection of user fee as per the notified rates, using passive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
Over 70 lakh FASTags had been issued till Wednesday, with the highest per-day issuance of 1,35,583 tags on November 26, 2019, whereas 1.03 lakh tags were issued on the day before. The average daily issuance had grown by 330 per cent from 8,000 in July to 35,000 tags sold in November 2019 after the Government announced to implement it from December 1.
