NHAI Caps Toll Plazas at Eight Lanes; Variations Unpriced

NHAI’s New Toll Plaza Standard

NHAI issued the circular on Friday. Every contractor holding an awarded National Highway package now has a pricing decision it was not given time to make.

The land saving is genuine.

- Plazas are capped at eight lanes plus one over-dimension lane, with gantry-mounted RFID readers and ANPR cameras replacing the booth arrays that pushed some six- and eight-lane toll plazas past 30 lanes.
- Design throughput is fixed at 600 vehicles per hour per lane.
- Six-metre gantry clearance and variable message signs a kilometre upstream are now obligations, not options.

DPR-stage projects fold the layout into bidding documents. Awarded and under-construction projects adopt it, in NHAI’s language, through “changes in the scope of work.”

That phrase carries the exposure.

Contractual Exposure for Contractors

L&T, Dilip Buildcon, PNC Infratech and IRB Infrastructure price EPC and HAM packages against a plaza footprint sanctioned at bid stage.

Cutting lanes removes earthwork, pavement, booths and land. It adds gantry steel, electronics integration, and a completion interface the civil contractor does not control.

The tolling system is procured separately through IHMCL, NHAI’s tolling arm, on its own timeline.

A contractor can therefore be held to a completion date by a systems package that is neither in its scope nor in its price.

Two things follow for anyone bidding this quarter:

- Push gantry integration out of civil rates into a separately defined line item with its own completion test and delay remedy.
- Establish whether the eight-lane ceiling bites retroactively on concessions already carrying 20-lane plazas — the answer belongs in the bid, not in arbitration.

Revenue Assurance and the Bid Review Signal

Revenue assurance is the larger unresolved item. Eight lanes at 600 vehicles per hour is a design assumption written into concession documents.

Indian corridors have not been observed at that rate under mixed traffic, partial FASTag penetration and over-dimensional freight.

Where throughput underperforms, queue spillback lands on the main carriageway and on the concessionaire’s revenue clock.

MoRTH has pursued free-flow tolling since the 2021 fee-rules amendment. NHAI has now converted that policy intent into a delivery obligation without rewriting the contracts built around the old plaza.

The signal for bid review: tolling has moved from a civil deliverable to a systems-uptime obligation.

The first MLFF variation schedule NHAI signs sets the reference price for NH awards well beyond this financial year.