Video-Surveillance System to Boost Traffic Decongestion Efforts on National Highways

In order to monitor and maintain ideal traffic conditions on national highways, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways (MoRTH) will deploy video surveillance systems at national highway Toll plazas. Through this system, the NHAI will be able to reduce vehicular congestion at Toll booths. This system adds to the list of all measures taken by the NHAI in the recent years to curb traffic and develop road infrastructure.

The National Highways Authority of India, which is a statutory body established through NHAI act 1988, was delegated with developing, monitoring, and managing the assigned portion of the national highway network. The NHAI has been one of the executing bodies of the National Highways Development Program (NHDP), which was launched with the aim to widen the national highways and also connect all the economic bastions of the nation.

To tackle the issues, the NHAI has introduced a slew of measures and initiatives to manage traffic in a commuter-friendly way. Video-based surveillance system is one such initiative to manage vehicular congestion at Toll plazas. The video-based surveillance system, which is first of its kind for Toll plazas, has been put in place to monitor vehicular traffic on national highways as part of the Bharatmala Pariyojana aimed at improving the conditions of Indian road network.

To implement the surveillance system, each NHAI-operated Toll gate would be provided with cameras and other supporting infrastructure. The NHAI has already commenced work in this regard. This system would be operational in 10 Toll plazas soon and in the next six months would be expanded to 200 Toll Plazas, which witness a vehicular traffic of 10,000 vehicles per day. Each of the identified Toll plazas would be provided with 100 mbps internet connectivity and also other IT infrastructure, which can compile information in a structured way.

The aforementioned system could click pictures of vehicular traffic and convey real-time information to the regional offices and headquarters of NHAI in a time-based manner. If there is a standstill at Toll plazas, then the cameras would switch to video mode and report the situation to the concerned agencies, so that they could act faster.

If this video-based surveillance system becomes operational across all the Toll plazas, it would give boost the existing congestion-curbing mechanisms like FASTag Toll collection system. FASTags are Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags, which are unique and to be linked to bank accounts in order to function. FASTags need to get affixed to vehicles’ windscreens to enable RFID sensors read the details of vehicles and deduct the Toll without any human intervention. This system also reduces the waiting time at Toll plazas thus improving the vehicular movement at Toll plazas. With both these systems in place, the journey on national highways would be seamless.

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