FASTag: Convenience or Concern?

Earlier this year, my FASTag stopped working. There was no notice from Paytm, whose payments bank had issued it. The Reserve Bank had acted against Paytm Payments Bank, but no ordinary person reads RBI notices. I found out the way most people did: my choice was to buy a new tag from another bank, or pay double at every toll.

That made me look harder at a system most of us use without thinking. FASTag was introduced in India in 2016, under the National Electronic Toll Collection programme of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), with the promise of making toll payments faster and easier. On paper, it sounds perfect: no more fumbling for cash, no more long waits at toll booths. In practice, I have come to wonder whether it is really just a convenience, or something more concerning.

What FASTag has become

FASTag is an RFID tag on your windscreen that pays tolls automatically. It started as a voluntary option. It has been mandatory since December 2019, with full enforcement from February 2021. Without one, you pay double the toll in cash, and your vehicle can be blacklisted.

One tag, one vehicle

Each vehicle can have only one active FASTag at a time. That is quite different from how we use other payment instruments. I can hold several credit or debit cards linked to the same account, each doing the same job. If FASTag is just a payment instrument, why must it be one tag per vehicle?

NHAI’s answer, when it brought in “One Vehicle, One FASTag” this year, is misuse: several tags on one vehicle, one tag moved across many, tags issued without KYC. But what really matters at a toll is the size or category of the vehicle, and whether the toll for it was paid. When people paid in cash, there was no tag at all, and tolls were still collected by vehicle. The tag was never what made toll collection work, so tying it to a single vehicle is not what stops misuse.

Why does a toll tag need your identity?

Why does FASTag need your vehicle’s engine or chassis number, when the registration number on the number plate is public? If it is just about paying tolls, why does it ask for your driving licence, your Aadhaar number or your home address? In the old system, you handed over cash. Why do we suddenly need all this personal information?

These requirements go beyond what toll collection needs. Together they make FASTag a record of where you go, when you go and how often you travel, tied rigidly to your identity. It is the same pattern I wrote about in When Your Mobile Number Becomes Your Identity: an everyday convenience quietly becoming the key to who we are.

When the system fails, you pay the price

My Paytm experience was not an isolated case. Imagine driving up to a toll booth and finding that your FASTag doesn’t work. Maybe the tag has failed, or the reader, or the server, or someone in between. The tool designed to save you time now costs you time, and then charges you double for the privilege.

Doubling the toll for a failure that is not yours is punitive, not corrective. Penalties should be proportionate, and a brief delay at a toll booth hardly justifies a 100% increase in fees.

NHAI has already accepted the principle. Its 2021 guidelines mark a yellow line 100 metres from each toll booth: if the queue stretches past it, vehicles pass without paying until it clears. If waiting too long earns a free pass, a system failure should too, whatever failed along the way.

The case for convenience, and why it falls short

Most arguments for FASTag are about efficiency: less congestion at toll booths and smoother traffic. But if FASTag were only about convenience, why isn’t it optional? Why can’t we pay by cash, or by UPI, without a penalty? And why does it need personal details to activate?

Then there is transparency. Linking toll payments to your vehicle registration makes your movements easy to track. That is said to reduce toll evasion, but it raises a harder question: should we trade the freedom to move without being tracked for a little more transparency at toll booths?

There is an environmental argument too. Less idling at toll booths saves fuel, which is good. But does that justify turning every vehicle on the road into a data point in a potential surveillance network? There are other ways to get the same benefit without giving up privacy.

What FASTag should be

FASTag does not need to be what it has become: mandatory, and tied to your identity. It could be one of several ways to pay at a toll booth, chosen freely, focused only on paying the toll.

It should also be fair when it fails. If a failure anywhere in the system keeps you waiting, you should not pay the toll at all, and there should be a clear way to prove the failure and be compensated.

The government should rethink FASTag: optional, flexible and limited to toll payments. Consumers should not bear the cost of system failures, or trade their privacy for a slightly faster toll booth. In a democracy, power changes hands. Entrusting this much information to any single entity, without strong, transparent and enforceable safeguards, is a risk. What is used responsibly today could be misused tomorrow.