India’s toll network is losing its boom barriers. PIB’s release of 2 May 2026 (Release ID 2257491) announces the Chorayasi plaza on the Surat-Bharuch section of NH-48 in Gujarat as India’s first Multi-Lane Free Flow tolling site, with around 41,500 vehicles crossing on the first day. The release does not state the go-live date; secondary reporting puts it at Friday 1 May 2026. Either way there are now several months of published operating data to look at rather than a slide in a presentation. The MLFF tolling India rolled out this year removes three things — the boom barrier, the lane discipline and the stop — and adds one: an enforcement pipeline that runs after the vehicle has gone.
This is a status report and a hardware explainer, not a policy argument, and the second half covers the part news coverage skips: what an open gantry asks of a tag that a barrier lane never did. To state it at the outset — Identium does not issue FASTags, which come from banks under NPCI’s programme, and we have no role at NHAI plazas. Nothing below is a claim to supply any MLFF site. The policy, deployment and operating figures here are drawn from press reporting and should be verified with MoRTH or NHAI before you plan around it. The regulatory material is separate: the section below names the gazette notification that created the e-notice and quotes the rules it inserted, and it is dated and attributed so you can check it yourself.
What MLFF actually is, and what stops happening at the plaza
Multi-Lane Free Flow tolling removes three things: the boom barrier, the lane discipline, and the stop. Instead of funnelling vehicles into fixed lanes behind a barrier, an MLFF site puts a gantry over the open carriageway. Vehicles pass underneath at highway speed, in whatever lane they are already in, and the toll is charged without anyone slowing.
What MLFF adds is less discussed but more consequential: an e-notice pipeline. In a barrier plaza, a failed read resolves physically — the boom stays down and an operator sorts it out. Take the barrier away and that moment of resolution is gone. A vehicle that cannot be charged simply drives on, and the system pursues it afterwards from the plate image. Every barrier removed converts a lane-side exception into a post-facto enforcement case.
The instrument behind the e-notice
Coverage of barrier-free tolling describes the e-notice but rarely names what created it — and neither PIB’s release of 18 March 2026 (Release ID 2242020) nor NHAI’s release of the same date prints the notification number. It is worth having, because there is no single “MLFF rule” to cite. The e-notice was inserted into the National Highways Fee (Determination of Rates and Collection) Rules, 2008 — published vide G.S.R. 838(E) dated 5 December 2008 — by an amendment:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Notification | G.S.R. 191(E) |
| Short title | National Highways Fee (Determination of Rates and Collection) (Second Amendment) Rules, 2026 |
| Published | Gazette of India Extraordinary, Part II, Section 3(i), No. 185, dated 17 March 2026 |
| In force from | 17 March 2026 — clause 1(2), on the date of publication |
| What it inserted | Rule 2(1)(o), defining “unpaid user fee”; and rule 14, new sub-rules (2A) to (2E) |
| Enabling provision | Section 9, National Highways Act, 1956 (48 of 1956) |
| File number | F. No. H-25016/06/2025-Toll (E-262154) |
| Gazette ID | CG-DL-E-18032026-271032 |
Two dates get conflated. The notification and the gazette issue are both dated 17 March 2026, which is also when it commenced; 18 March 2026 is the date of the PIB and NHAI releases and of the eGazette upload. A publication date is not an instrument’s date.
The Rules do not appear to speak of “MLFF” or “barrier-free” at all. In the four amendments we opened ourselves, neither “Multi-Lane Free Flow”, “MLFF” nor “barrier-free” appears as an operative or defined term — and we have not read the whole chain, which runs to more than two dozen amendments of the 2008 Rules. What the Rules do speak of is GNSS On-Board Units, Automatic Number Plate Recognition Devices and FASTag, “or any combination thereof” — wording introduced on 9 September 2024 by the Amendment Rules, 2024, which is where ANPR becomes a lawful mode of user-fee collection rather than merely a camera on a gantry. That instrument carries two numbers: the gazette prints it as S.O. 3856(E) in Part II, Section 3, Sub-section (ii), while MoRTH’s own footnotes in later amendments cite it as G.S.R. 556(E), dated 9 September 2024. Cite both. On the text of that amendment, the GNSS deferral described above is a policy position rather than a legal obstacle — the Rules already define a GNSS On-Board Unit at rule 2(1)(he) and provide for collection through one.
The sanction, and where VAHAN actually sits
Three features of the new rule 14 matter commercially:
- The amount is a multiple, with a 72-hour discount. Rule 14(2B) sets the sum payable at twice the user fee for that vehicle category under sub-rule (2) of rule 4, reduced to the ordinary single fee where the unpaid fee is paid within seventy-two hours of issuance.
- A contested notice can lapse. Rule 14(2C) allows a representation through the designated electronic portal within seventy-two hours. Rule 14(2D) requires the executing authority or concessionaire to dispose of it within five days of receipt, and its proviso states that if it is not disposed of by then, “the claim of the executing authority or concessionaire to the unpaid user fee shall cease.”
- After fifteen days it moves to VAHAN. Rule 14(2E): where the fee is still unpaid fifteen days after issuance and no representation is pending, the amount “shall be posted onto the National Vehicle Registry (VAHAN)”, and such restrictions “may be imposed” on services provided for that vehicle through VAHAN as the Central Government may specify.
So VAHAN does three jobs, and not the one usually attributed to it. It supplies the registered-owner identity the notice is raised in, “as available in the National Vehicle Registry (VAHAN)” (rule 14(2A)(a)). It is the register a default is posted to and the channel through which services may be restricted (rule 14(2E)) — and note the asymmetry there: posting the dues is mandatory, “shall be posted”, while the restrictions are discretionary and need separate specification. And integration of the National Electronic Toll Collection system with VAHAN is something the Central Government or its executing authority “may undertake” under rule 14(2A)(d) — permissive, not mandated, so coverage saying the rules integrate NETC with VAHAN overstates the text. On the text of the rule, VAHAN plays no part in detection; that is ETC infrastructure, ANPR and FASTag.
Operationally, PIB’s MLFF release of 2 May 2026 (Release ID 2257491) says non-payment of e-notices “may result in blacklisting of FASTag and restriction of other vehicle-related services through the VAHAN platform”, and names the notice portal as nhfeenotice.parivahan.gov.in, which was returning a live page when we checked on 8 October 2026. A second lever is reported in the Central Motor Vehicles (Second Amendment) Rules, 2026 of mid-January 2026, said to make the absence of unpaid user fee a condition for a national permit and for a Form 28 no-objection certificate — we have not opened that gazette and the reported dates differ between secondary sources, so treat it as unconfirmed.
Two cautions before relying on any of this. G.S.R. 191(E) is not the latest amendment to the 2008 Rules: the chain continues through G.S.R. 251(E) of 2 April 2026 and G.S.R. 279(E) of 13 April 2026, and we have not traced it beyond that date. And the new sub-rule (2A) operates “for the purposes of giving effect to sub-rule (2)” of rule 14, which we have not read in consolidated form, so the underlying recovery power is not set out here. Take the gazette PDF and the consolidated Rules from the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways rather than from this or any other summary.
The 2026 decision: RFID plus ANPR, with GNSS deferred
For several years the working assumption was that India would move to GNSS, or satellite-based, tolling — charging by distance travelled rather than by plaza crossed. That is not what has happened so far.
As reported in July 2026 from a written reply by Nitin Gadkari in the Rajya Sabha, MLFF is being implemented through ANPR cameras with AI analytics alongside the existing RFID-based FASTag. On GNSS, the reply was reported to say that the expert committees reviewing the proposal had recommended further deliberation, on security, privacy, data-breach and overall operational-control grounds. In plain terms, and on the reporting available: satellite tolling is deferred rather than adopted. It is not cancelled either, so treat it as an open question and confirm the current position with MoRTH or NHAI.
The practical logic behind the choice is straightforward. The passive UHF (EPC Gen2) tag on the windshield and the reader network that talks to it already exist at national scale, so building MLFF on them is a gantry upgrade — where GNSS would have meant an on-board unit in every vehicle in the country. For the physics of the tag itself, our explainer on how FASTag works covers the passive UHF read in detail.
Where barrier-free tolling is live as of September 2026
Considerably less of the network than the headlines suggest. Every figure in this table is a reported one.
| Status | Reported figure |
|---|---|
| First plaza live | Chorayasi, NH-48 Gujarat — reported 1 May 2026, announced by PIB 2 May 2026 |
| Operational (as of Aug 2026) | 6 of 17 first-phase plazas |
| Further plazas tendered | Bids invited for 104 more, across seven states |
| Total MLFF sites in the pipeline | About 121 |
| Barrier plazas on national highways | 1,150-plus |
On those numbers, a fully built pipeline is still only about a tenth of the national-highway plaza network. Which specific plazas and which states are in the tendered batch is the kind of detail that moves between one news cycle and the next, so check the current tender list with NHAI rather than a blog.
You will also see targets quoted of around 70% of plazas by December 2026 and full coverage by March 2027. Those are reported targets, not enacted policy — statements of intent as covered in the press. Plan against the tendered pipeline, not against a date.
What the published operating data show
Autocar Professional reported in August 2026 that the operational sites had together processed over 110 lakh vehicle passages and more than Rs 147 crore in toll revenue since Chorayasi went live in May. Within that, electronic toll collection was reported to account for roughly 94% of revenue, with the remainder collected outside that channel.
That 94% is the number worth holding on to: the tag-first design is doing the overwhelming majority of the work, and the camera-and-notice layer is a genuine fallback rather than a parallel system running alongside it.
Why about one in ten passages ends in an e-notice — and what that number does not tell you
Reporting from the same period put the e-notice rate at about one in ten passages. That figure is widely repeated and almost as widely misread.
It is not a 10% tag-failure rate. About one in ten passages ended in an e-notice, and the published data does not say how many of those were tag problems versus no tag at all, low balance or a blacklisted account — plate-read fallbacks sit in the same bucket. Anyone quoting it as a hardware reliability statistic, tag vendors included, is going beyond what the source supports.
What it does tell you is that exception handling is now a standing operational cost of running a plaza, rather than something an operator absorbs in the lane. That is the shift worth planning for.
What an open gantry asks of the tag
A barrier lane is forgiving because it has a human backstop: a marginal tag gets a second read at walking pace, and failing that, an operator. A gantry has neither. One pass, at speed, and the vehicle is gone. That changes what “good enough” means for three things:
- Placement. The reader antenna sits above and ahead of the vehicle. A windshield tag mounted low, behind a wiper arm, or in the shadow of a metallised or heat-reflective coating has a narrower window at highway speed than the same tag had at a crawl. Placement tolerance shrinks as speed rises.
- Tamper evidence. A tag built to fail when lifted is doing enforcement work, not just anti-fraud work. Purpose-built tamper-evident windshield tags are made to tear rather than peel — lifting the sticker destroys the antenna, so a removed tag stops responding instead of moving to another vehicle. A partially lifted tag is the classic marginal-read case.
- Read consistency across a population. A plaza is tuned once for the whole fleet. A tag family with wide unit-to-unit variation will show that variation as a scatter of failed reads, which is precisely what an e-notice pipeline exists to catch.
What it asks of the reader side
The gantry is a harder antenna problem than a lane reader, for reasons that generalise to any high-speed installation:
- Polarisation. Vehicles present windshields at varying tilt across car, SUV and truck classes. Circular polarisation trades some gain for tolerance of tag orientation, which is usually the right trade when the population is mixed. Our antenna guide on gain and polarisation works through that choice.
- Angle and dwell. Higher-gain antennas narrow the beam. A narrower beam means less time illuminating a fast-moving tag, so gain has to be traded against how long the tag stays in the read zone.
- Adjacent-lane rejection. With no lane discipline, a read must be attributable to the right vehicle. This is the requirement that makes an open gantry genuinely harder than a toll lane, and it is why such installations use several aimed antennas rather than one broad one.
What fleet operators should check before a route goes barrier-free
If your trucks run a corridor on the tendered list, three practical checks are worth running now:
- Inspect tag condition across the fleet — lifted corners, cracked inlays, tags relocated after a windshield replacement.
- Confirm account health — balance and blacklist status are an unglamorous category of exception, and the cheapest one to fix.
- Reconcile against your own records. Fleets already dealing with e-way bill RFID compliance, or running their own gate reads through an RFID vehicle tracking system, have a movement log of their own to compare toll charges against.
What private plazas, plants and campuses can borrow
The MLFF model does not transfer directly to a private site, because a private operator usually cannot pursue an unidentified vehicle afterwards. What is transferable is the tag-first, camera-fallback architecture and the read-at-speed discipline behind it. In practice that means a well-aimed UHF gate reader that identifies a vehicle early enough for the barrier to lift before it arrives — so nobody stops — with an ANPR camera as the exception handler. Our comparison of RFID vs ANPR for gate access covers where each earns its place, and the transportation overview sets out where vehicle identification fits across plants, yards and fleets.
Identium’s fixed gate readers and antennas are WPC-approved for India’s licence-exempt UHF RFID band, and every unit is tested in-house before dispatch. Those short-range-device rules, G.S.R. 853(E) of 10 December 2021, set the band at 865-868 MHz in express supersession of the 2005 Rules that had set 865-867 MHz. If you are planning a vehicle lane that has to read at speed, talk to our team about tags, antenna layout and the read geometry your site actually has.
The same electronic rail is now statutory for overloading as well as tolls: our post on the overloading fee under the National Highways Rules 2026 sets out G.S.R. 279(E), which makes FASTag a collection route for overloading fees at a graded 2x or 4x of the applicable toll, bars collection at any plaza without a notified weighing device, and leaves pre-existing private concessions outside the rule unless the concessionaire opts in.