What keeps a toll corridor working

Electronic tolling removed most cash from our lanes but not the disputes. Across 11 plazas and 136 lanes, more than 98 per cent of transactions now use FASTag, and the remaining problems concentrate in a few places: tags read against the wrong vehicle class, blacklisted or low-balance tags, exempt vehicles and residents entitled to local passes. My tolling head reconciles every plaza's transactions against vehicle classification images each day. I review the weekly exceptions with corridor heads, because a rising dispute count usually means a camera, a lane layout or a shift supervisor needs attention. I also watch queue length at peak hours. A plaza that collects accurately but holds traffic for twelve minutes on a festival evening is failing users, and it eventually invites complaints that no reconciliation can answer.

Each concession sets obligations for route patrol, ambulances, cranes and communication with the police. I treat those as minimums. Our incident centre logs every call, dispatch and arrival, and I review median response time by corridor every month, separately for night hours. Where the data shows slow arrivals, we change where vehicles wait before buying more of them. Road safety needs engineering as well as response: median openings, signage at plaza approaches, truck parking and lighting near settlements. Those changes usually require the authority's approval and conversations with district officials and villages. I keep a register of fatal-crash locations for each corridor and review it with the safety head before every maintenance programme, so that the year's work begins where people are most at risk, not where the surface looks worst.

In north India the monsoon decides much of our maintenance year. Before June, every concession completes culvert and drain desilting, embankment slope checks and a review of locations that flooded in earlier seasons. Corridor heads hold standby arrangements with local contractors for earth, stone and machinery, priced in advance. After heavy rain, patrol teams report scour, ponding and edge failures by photograph, and the maintenance engineer decides whether to close a lane. I accept that some damage is unavoidable. What I try to prevent is the repeat failure, where a quick repair restores traffic but leaves the cause in place. Pavement condition surveys after each monsoon feed the next year's renewal plan, so the drainage and surface budgets are considered together rather than competing for the same money.

Most of our physical work is done by contractors: routine maintenance gangs, periodic overlays, bridge repairs, electrical and toll-system upkeep. I prefer contracts that pay for measured outcomes, such as roughness, rutting and repair response times, rather than quantities alone. Work is accepted only after our engineers and, where required, the concession's engineer have inspected it, with retention held against defects. Where the sponsor's construction business bids, the contract is a related-party matter and goes through the investment manager's approval process with sponsor nominees excluded. I review contractor safety records with the same weight as price. A maintenance gang working beside live traffic at night is among the most exposed groups on our roads, and a contractor that cannot show its traffic-management plan does not work for us.

Toll records tell us how many vehicles paid; they do not tell us everything about how the road is used. We compare plaza data with automatic traffic counts, axle-load observations and diversion patterns when parallel roads open or close. That evidence supports maintenance planning and helps the investment manager understand revenue changes without guessing. It also matters at the end of a concession. A road returning to the authority must meet the condition the agreement requires, supported by records of inspections, repairs and asset inventories. For our Rajasthan concession, which ends in March 2027, I started a handback register in 2024 listing every structure, defect and document the joint inspection will examine. I would start that register a year earlier for the next concession we return.