It is quite common for passengers who travel on national highways need to wait at toll plazas to pay toll tax.

Much time is wasted in huge queues especially in festival days and in the days of successive holidays. In order to reduce the time waste and the delay in toll lanes electronic toll collection came into picture.

It is intended to eliminate the delays on toll roads. Since India is going digital and aiming for cashless transactions, electronic toll facility was initiated.

FASTag which is intended for cashless payment mechanism was started in April, last year by the National Highways Authority of India earlier in more than 275 toll plazas.

India has 350 toll plazas and the FASTag facility will be expected to be functional within a year.

Yesterday, the Road Transport and Highways Ministry stated that one lane for FASTag vehicles will be kept at all toll plazas of national highways from September 1 onwards.

It is further revealed that minimum of one lane shall be allotted for the FASTag vehicles among all hybrid lanes where no other modes of payment for toll shall be agreed.

This will come into effect from next month onwards.

.FASTags can be fixed on the windshield of the vehicles so that the payments for toll can be made from their accounts. These are pre-paid accounts which are already linked.

From today onwards, FASTags can be purchased online or offline for this purpose. These can be bought from bank websites and the websites of National Highways Authority of India and Indian Highways Management Company Ltd.

FASTags are also available from sale points that are established near toll plazas. It is expected that the fixing and incorporation of RFID tags at all toll plazas will be finished by October 31.

Image credit: Toll Ahead (JFK Highway, Maryland) image by bobbsled is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Image Reference: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mpd01605/3648679499