The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has released the ratings for 18,668 km of completed four-/ six-lane national highway stretches covering 343 toll plazas.
This has been done by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) under MoRTH, which has taken initiative to improve its accountability towards road users who pay user fee for developed national highways.
This initiative has been taken as per vision of improving the quality of public services. The fundamental objective of highway rating is ‘Minimum time with maximum safety in stress free environment’ from highway users’ perspective.
Each toll plaza of highway is judged based on three major criteria, namely efficiency, safety and user services. These criteria are further divided into a total of 39 parameters which include average speed, road condition, facility for public like VUP/ PUP/FOB, service road, delay at toll plaza, accidents, incident response time, wayside amenities, general cleanliness, etc.
These criteria were framed after detailed studies held in NHAI and MoRTH before its final approval by MoRTH. No such criteria have been developed across the globe in the past which evaluates the performance of highways from the users’ perspective.
The Ministry has also begun real-time monitoring of toll plazas across the country. It is a simple help to improve traffic congestion problem at toll plazas/ city roads/highways by using central monitoring system along with bundle of analytics and quick decision-making outputs.
This is eventually likely to facilitate saving the commute time, improve customer experience, save fuel wastage cost and reduce carbon footprint. It uses several technologies such as satellite imagery, GIS, remote sensing along with a proprietary algorithm to remotely monitor the congestion status of roads. The frequency sample of data can be as low as even one to five minutes depending upon requirements.
As much as 11,035 km national highways have been constructed during FY21, which represents a rate of 35 km per day.