Highway toll pocketed by strongmen and politicians

There are as many as 9.3 million trucks registered in the country for commercial transportation and they pay an average toll fee of ₹5 for every Kilometre they drive.

The shocking part is that according to official records, ₹22,000 crore is what the toll fees yield every year. “It’s a black hole and nobody really knows how much is getting siphoned off by the complicity of the corrupt and the criminal,” says Mumbai-based Murtaza Hamid, who has been raising the issue with the government.

“By our conservative estimates, it looks like the government is losing as much as ₹1.57 lakh crore every year,” he asserts, before admitting that the actual loss could indeed be far higher.

The distance between Ludhiana and Pune (1,766 kms), Chennai and Mumbai (1,333 kms) and Kolkata and Kanpur (1,002 kms) being what they are, a truck carrying any product between these cities would be paying between five thousand Rupees for the shortest distance and around nine thousand Rupees to the toll bridges on these routes.

Now, assuming only four million of the 9.3 million trucks actually are on the road on a given day, and assuming further that each one of them covers only 100 kilometres a day, each trucker would be paying ₹500 in toll. Or ₹200 crore a day. Rupees six thousand crore a month and ₹72,000 crore a year.

But the government admits that the collections are just ₹22,000 crore! So, where is the rest of the money going? How much to the law-enforcing agencies and the politicians and how much to the toll concessionaires?

Mumbai-based Hamid has been in touch with the PMO. He has also had three meetings with Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, and several more with Indian Oil Corporation and Reliance Industry among others. Reliance and IOL, in fact, conducted a pilot in Rajasthan to test the ‘ technology’ patented by Hamid to track trucks on road and simplify procedures so that it becomes a win-win situation for everyone. The collections too would increase dramatically, he claims.

But even as some foreign governments have evinced interest in buying his technology, the government of India has told him to wait till the general election of May 2019, only following which will a decision be taken. Reliance also wanted to buy his technology, but for a pittance, he claims.

Data put together by Hamid, compiled from various government and unofficial sources, indicates that 40 lakh trucks are on the highways 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “The average toll of state and national highways for single and multi-axle trucks is ₹5 per kilometre,” he had pointed out in his presentation to Gadkari the first time they met in April 2016.

“These 40 lakh trucks, on average, run 300 kms in 24 hours and if they pay ₹5 per km the average toll collection from trucks in 24 hrs a day should be ₹600 crore and if we take an average of 300 days in a year, the toll collection, which is paid by the truckers should actually be ₹1,80,000 crore,” he told the minister. But the latest government figures put the toll revenue of the government at just ₹23,000 crore.

The actual loss figures could be much higher, since the ₹23,000 crore collection is the total toll collected, 86% of which would be from commercial vehicles, Hamid claimed before Gadkari.

“But the shortfall of ₹1,57,000 crore is calculated only from trucks, and toll collected from other commercial and private vehicles hasn’t been included,” says a member of Hamid’s team, who has been working on extrapolating the revenue losses.

The small team claim to have been working on the cost of road transport for the past 10 years. During the course of their research, they claim to have spoken to at least 22,000 transporters across India, besides top government and industry officials.

“The nexus between toll collectors, once the toll collection is sub-contracted to local strongmen, and big transporters is a major cause of concern. Approximately 33% of the revenue collected through toll is not even reflected in records,” the team claimed in its representations to the PMO and the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.

“If it is a six-lane toll bridge, then collection from two toll booths don’t get reflected in government records. There is a proper mechanism in place to pull wool over the eyes of the authorities. The serial number of toll tickets issued by certain booths are different from serial numbers issued by the other booths. This helps to distinguish between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ collections. It is a prevalent practice at 90% of the toll plazas across the country,” they claim.

A letter sent by the All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC) to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on August 29 this year blamed the toll plazas for massive losses and described them as “cesspools of corruption.”

“The process of collecting toll is not transparent and is mired in corruption and malpractices by the toll collectors and concessionaires. Moreover, on the basis of study done by the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, in 2010, frequent stoppages made at the toll barriers result into loss of man hours worth ₹27,000 crore and fuel loss worth ₹60,000 crore, amounting to a separate loss of ₹87,000 crore,” the August 29 letter to the PMO says.

The letter to the PMO by the apex transport body, which claims to represent the interests of 15 crore people associated with the road transport sector, further flagged logistical hindrances, including fuel losses due to delayed waiting times at toll booths and high inventory costs among others.

The scathing letter further notes that even the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), in a report in 2013-14, had pointed towards “mismanagement of crores of rupees” in country’s toll collection.

Toll barrier-free India

Since 2015, the AIMTC has called two nationwide strikes of truckers, with “toll-barrier free India” being one of the main demands of the truckers’ body.

As noted in preceding paragraphs, human corruption at toll plazas, fuel wastage due to delayed waiting time in toll queues and a flawed collection mechanism have been blamed for causing losses worth thousands of crores of Rupees annually, a fact verified by both IIM Kolkata and Hamid.

Hamid, who is in touch with both the PMO and Gadkari, says that he has pitched a fuel burn radiation technology (FBRT) that would allow trucks to seamlessly pass through toll plazas without any obstruction or chances of swindling.

As per Hamid’s technology, the details of which are with the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), vehicle tracking is possible without using any kind of GPS, GPRS, RFID tag or any other device.

Hamid and his team claim their technology, if adopted, could even ensure that private vehicles don’t have to pay any toll, since toll collections from commercial transporters would make up for the shortfall.

The “biggest roadblock,” Hamid says, that’s keeping their technology from being piloted at a pan-India level, is the Ministry of Highways and Shipping.

Available records show that Hamid’s “virtual toll” technology was successfully tested with assistance from the Indian Oil Corporation and Reliance Communications back in 2012.

“In June 2012, the trial phase for non-GPS vehicle tracking system was done in Jaipur with the help of 750 transporters. The Indian Oil Corporation and Reliance had jointly participated in the event, which came to be known as “Indian Oil Reliance Friendship Offer.”

A further endorsement of Hamid’s technology was provided by Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), to which the claim was referred to by Gadkari in April 2016.

“C-DAC recommended that the technology be tried across India, for which we needed satellite access from Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO),” said Hamid. A scientist with C-DAC had said at the time that the technology could prove to be a “game-changer.”

The communication trail also indicate that the idea was endorsed by the PMO as well, which however said that final decision on its use was of Gadkari’s. The team claims that Gadkari has been sitting on the technology.

This prompted the frustrated Mumbai based entrepreneur to endorse his technology to the nation on a ₹500 stamp paper by way of an affidavit.

“I dedicated my technology to the nation for just Re 1. I endorsed it on a stamp paper to the Prime Minister,” he declares.

Why is Gadkari not keen?

“There is a strong lobby of transporters and companies that manage toll booths (BOT basis) that do not want this,” claims Hamid, who has been attacked twice in the last three years by unidentified persons.

Despite his repeated requests to Mumbai Police to provide him security cover, his pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

He notes the disputes over toll collections, involving big private companies, are a case in point. “The companies, despite having recovered their building costs, don’t want to give up control over toll collection, which is often the case.”

“They are scared of transparency. Isn’t that obvious by now?”