ICICI Bank has partnered with the ministry of road transport and highways, National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and Indian Highways Management Company to launch the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) program on the National Highway 8. This service enables motorists to pay tolls electronically without stopping at the toll plazas in the 1428-km highway which connects Mumbai with New Delhi. With the Ahmedabad-Delhi corridor of NH-8 being brought under the ETC program, the entire highway is now covered by this program. The bank launched the ETC program on the Mumbai-Vadodara stretch of NH8 and Vadodara-Ahmedabad Expressway in 2013. Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO of the bank, said the bank is delighted to be associated with implementation of ETC on national highways ETC substantially enhances convenience for users, and the bank believes it will play a very important role in contributing to the growth of cashless payments in India. To enable electronic payments at toll plazas, a prepaid RFID tag known as ‘FASTag’ is affixed on the windscreen of the vehicle. As the vehicle crosses the toll plazas, the information is passed to the motorist’s prepaid account created at the central clearing house set up by the bank and the applicable toll amount is deducted and transferred to the concessionaire’s account electronically. A vehicle with the ‘FASTag’ can use the dedicated lanes on either side of the toll plaza to avoid long queues in the cash lanes of the toll plazas. There are 26 toll plazas from Mumbai to Delhi on NH8. Five of them are between Mumbai and Vadodara, six from Vadodara to Ahmedabad and 15 between Ahmedabad and Delhi. Anyone, including non-customers of the bank, can buy the tag from select ICICI Bank branches or PoS terminals set up by concessionaires at toll plazas by showing the KYC documents and paying the required fee.
