The Municipal Corporation of Delhi has started installing multi-lane free-flow tolling for commercial vehicles at 20 of its border toll points, 12 of them on national highways, beginning at the Ghazipur and Badarpur crossings. MCD Deputy Commissioner (Toll) Sumit Kumar said the first phase would be operational from November 2026, and that the system would then extend across the corporation’s remaining toll points, reported in October 2026 as 156 in total.
The MCD is the civic body responsible for municipal services across most of Delhi, and it has charged commercial vehicles for entering the city for decades. Alongside the toll it collects the Environmental Compensation Charge, a pollution levy on commercial vehicles entering Delhi, raised again in April 2026 on Supreme Court directions. The new installation takes both in a single pass, using RFID tags read on the move, Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras and radar, and reporting on the announcement says the equipment will read a tag at road speeds of up to 100 km/h. No supplier has been named, and no source in this story publishes the radio frequency the tags and readers use, so the band is left unstated here.
What free-flow tolling actually removes
Delhi already had RFID at its borders, but in a conventional barrier plaza with tag lanes: a lorry slows, queues, funnels into one marked lane, and a boom rises once the tag reads. The barrier does quiet work there, fixing the geometry, holding the vehicle still until the transaction completes and giving the reader a second attempt if the first fails.
Multi-lane free flow removes all of that. No barrier, no lane discipline. Readers and cameras go on a gantry spanning the carriageway, and a vehicle is identified wherever it sits across the full width of the road at whatever speed it is doing. That is a harder read than it sounds. Dwell time in the antenna’s field falls to a fraction of a second, so the reader gets far fewer attempts. The antennas must cover several lanes from gantry height with enough signal to reach a windscreen, while a stream of lorries presents large metal surfaces that reflect the signal and create nulls where a tag goes quiet. And because several tags can answer at once, the system must work out which tag belongs to which vehicle rather than assuming it is the one at the boom. Readers, tags and antennas are covered in our RFID glossary.
Why the camera and the radar sit beside the reader
The ANPR cameras and the radar are not decoration. The camera covers what the reader misses: vehicles with no tag, tags with no balance, and genuine misreads. The radar detects and classifies, counting axles so the right rate applies and giving an independent count of vehicles passed, so reads can be matched against traffic rather than taken on trust. Between them they turn tolling into an enforceable charge, because a timestamped plate image from a known gantry will support a demand, whereas a failed tag read is simply lost revenue. Enforcement detail remains thin: a June 2026 report said non-payers would receive digital notices with recovery under existing municipal regulations, and the October 2026 coverage notes no published procedure for untagged vehicles or empty accounts.
Eight years of a municipal tag
The eight years in the headline run back to October 2018, when the South Delhi Municipal Corporation, one of three corporations later reunified into the MCD in 2022, said it had completed RFID installation at 13 border toll plazas covering 73 toll lanes. It went live the following August. The interesting part is the tag: Delhi did not adopt FASTag, the national interoperable road-toll tag used across India’s highway network, but issued its own, registered through an application called ECG Tag at Rs 200 plus GST. A scheme that mints its own credential means an operator running into Delhi keeps two accounts topped up, and the city forgoes the interoperability, dispute handling and installed reader base of the national scheme. Eight years on, the 2026 work is still an upgrade of the corporation’s own RFID arrangements rather than a move onto FASTag.
A slipping programme, and a split that invites leakage
In June 2026 the plan was for the 20 key sites to be live by October 2026 and every border entry point by December 2026, with an agency still being selected to build and run the system. By October 2026 the first phase had become November 2026. The reported size of the estate varies as well: 156 entry points in the 2025 tender reporting and the October 2026 coverage, 154 in the June 2026 reports and 126 in one of them. The June 2026 tender document is the firmest figure, putting the project at 154 border points comprising 244 toll lanes, and for a free-flow build it is the lane count that governs the engineering.
In May 2025 the MCD issued a Rs 997 crore request for proposals for a contractor to collect the toll and the levy, split as an annual reserve price of roughly Rs 900 crore for toll and Rs 97 crore for the charge after refunds. That is approximately GBP 90 million or USD 115 million at 2026 rates, and the conversion is indicative only. The three-year contract required the plazas to be run to the standards of NHAI, the national highways authority whose tolling practice sets the benchmark.
One clause deserves more attention than it got. The collection contractor had to “maintain coordination with the RFID infrastructure concessionaire”, a separate and unnamed party holding the reader estate. Splitting the readers from the revenue is unusual and risky, because in free-flow tolling the read rate is the revenue. Every tag a gantry fails to see must be chased through a camera image or written off. Yet the party whose income depends on reads cannot touch the antennas or their maintenance, while the party owning the hardware carries no revenue exposure when performance drops. Accountability for the single number that decides whether the scheme works is divided across two contracts.
A procurement lesson for other city authorities
The current competition has already been through court, and the record is unusually instructive. The MCD’s notice inviting tender of 5 June 2026 covered toll and levy collection together with the upgrade of the existing RFID system to multi-lane free flow, across 154 border points comprising 244 toll lanes. It required a bidder to have operated at least half of those lanes, 122 of them, under a single contract for a minimum of two years. Seven firms bid and three qualified: Inderdeep Infra India, Infrastructure Developers and Sahakar Global. Skylark Infra Engineering and Sri Sai Enterprises and Developers were among those ruled technically ineligible.
Skylark challenged the 122-lane condition at the Delhi High Court, and the history behind that challenge is the striking part. The same bar had appeared in a February 2024 RFID tender, in which Skylark bid as a 37 per cent joint-venture partner of Sahakar Global and the venture was the highest-revenue bidder but never received a letter of intent. In the litigation that followed, the MCD itself told the court it regarded the 122-lane condition as anti-competitive, and it formally omitted the requirement by corporate resolution in July 2025, before reinstating it in the June 2026 tender. Skylark argued that it had run toll and levy collection at these same 154 Delhi border points from 2021 to 2026, and 2,349 toll lanes across 185 plazas over three financial years, but none of it under one contract in its own name.
On 20 July 2026 the court dismissed the petition, in Skylark Infra Engineering v Municipal Corporation of Delhi, W.P.(C) 8368 of 2026, neutral citation 2026:DHC:5745-DB. A division bench held that a tendering authority is best placed to assess the technical requirements of its own project, and that courts will not rewrite eligibility conditions simply to widen competition unless those conditions are shown to be arbitrary, mala fide, irrational or contrary to the public interest. The condition stands.
The transferable lesson is not that the bar was unlawful, because the court held it was not. It is that an authority has a real choice at this point and ought to make it deliberately. Multi-lane free flow is new enough that very few firms anywhere can show a large comparable estate already in service, so a threshold written as lanes operated under a single contract screens for incumbency as much as for competence. The MCD’s own file shows that trade-off being weighed in both directions inside two years: dropped as anti-competitive in July 2025, reinstated in June 2026, and three qualifying bidders from seven. A bar set that high buys confidence that the winner has run something of the size before, and the price is a short field and, on this occasion, a writ petition before the award. The levers for an authority that wants both are qualifying on demonstrable read-rate performance, or letting a consortium meet the bar between its members, which the MCD already permits for a non-lead joint-venture partner at 10 per cent of lanes. More road tolling coverage sits in our Road Tolls section.
