FASTag  Mandatory For All Vehicles

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TOPIC: General Studies 2

In News: The ministry of road transport and highways has made the use of FASTags—essentially windshield stickers with embedded radio frequency chips that can be read by sensors at toll plazas—mandatory and cash counters will be steadily shrunk at the 500-plus toll plazas around the country to make cashless payments the norm.

Now that FASTags are mandatory and new cars anyway come with these attached, road-pricing should actually be easier to implement everywhere.

What is FASTag?

Process: The tag needs to be affixed to the windscreen of the vehicle in such a way that the sensor at the toll plaza can read it. 

In January 2019, state-run oil marketing companies IOC, BPCL and HPCL have signed MoUs enabling the use of FASTag to make purchases at petrol pumps.

Benefits:

The Way Forward

The expanding use of FASTags for the payment of toll on highways should be seen as an opportunity to formulate and articulate a clear strategy on road-pricing and public transport.

Note:

Connecting the Dots:

  1. The future of mobility is shared, tolled and publicly-funded mass transport. Discuss.
  2. Can technologies that eliminate human intervention in governance completely obviate the need of establishing a value driven administration? Critically examine.

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