The new system will be piloted on limited highway stretches before it is rolled out nationwide, roads ministry secretary Anurag Jain said.

“Highway developer National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is working on satellite- or GPS-based tolling that would introduce a more equitable way of collecting tolls on highways. There are a few concerns on the new system that would be addressed and the learnings from initial projects would make way for devising a foolproof system of tolling that would later be available on more and more highway stretches,” Jain said.

Under the new system, toll will be collected on the go, ending the need for dedicated toll plazas. This will require geofencing of highways using global positioning system (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies to create a virtual geographic boundary, which would enable the software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves the fenced-off area.

So, under GPS-based tolling, vehicles will need to be fitted with a device that can track their movement, and toll will be charged based on the distance travelled at the exit point of a highway. This will allow commuters to pay a lower toll if the distance travelled is less, unlike the present system where tolls have to be paid for a fixed distance at toll plazas even if the vehicle has to exit after a shorter distance.

The new system is based on sensors, so commuters will not have to stop at toll plazas to pay toll. Under the system, highway users will have to get themselves and their vehicles registered, and link bank accounts to transfer toll payments.

“The road ministry has amended the National Highways Fee (Determination of Rates and Collection) Rules, 2008, allowing for the collection of toll fee based on distance travelled by the vehicle on the national highway. This will facilitate the introduction of a GPS-based system of tolling. But before such a thing is introduced, a lot of work also needs to be done to upgrade roads with technical infrastructure for a GPS-based system,” an official aware of the plans added on condition of anonymity.

The official said there were certain privacy concerns over GPS-based tolling that are being examined by the ministry and appropriate solutions would be available soon. GPS tolling would track personal data of individuals including their movement on highways.

The new system will be launched in phases, starting with voluntary adoption, the official added, acknowledging the difficulties in rolling it out in the absence of a proper regulatory framework on privacy.

FASTag-based tolling is based on fixed distance travelled on roads. The new system would take into account actual time and distance covered on the highways. Also, toll will be fixed on the basis of the actual size and weight of vehicles and not merely on the number of axles, as it is now. The idea is to levy toll based on how much space a vehicle occupies and how much weight it puts on the road infrastructure, resulting in faster wear and tear of roads.

To prepare the ground for the change, the ministry had earlier also asked the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi to calculate the latest passenger car unit (PCU) for various types of vehicles.

PCU is a vehicle unit used for expressing highway capacity or how much road capacity a vehicle will use and for how long. This unit was determined several years ago, and, in the meantime, the size of vehicles and their speed have changed. This will be captured in the revised PCU, which could also become the basis for determining toll charges on highways.

So, users with smaller and lighter vehicles covering smaller distances on highways would pay a lot less toll than those with bigger, heavier vehicles and covering longer distances. It would reward efficient vehicles with lower toll rates, while those putting road infrastructure to wear and tear and consuming more time and occupying more space will be charged more.

Around 80% of toll collected in India is from the movement of freight by commercial vehicles, and this segment may first be exposed to the changes.