In August 2025, a Public Accounts Committee comprising members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha presented a report, ‘Levy and Regulation of Fees, Tariffs, User Charges etc on Public Infrastructure and Other Public Utilities in the context of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).Having examined present design accountability, subcontracting, pavement failures, emergency response mechanisms, toll reforms, service quality, stakeholder consultations and other aspects, the Committee presented recommendations covering the planning and implementation of National Highway projects, and their associated safety, tolling and user services.CW asked the industry for opinions on these recommendations.Performance assessmentIndia’s highway network has undergone rapid expansion, especially in the past decade, and NHAI has evolved into a multilayered institution. Still, stakeholders complain about issues such as project delays, suboptimal service delivery, inconsistent design quality, inadequate safety features, lack of transparency in decision-making and weak enforcement of contractual obligations, among others. In the absence of a structural response mechanism, the institutional response to such concerns has often been fragmented and reactive. A recent audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India also brought out gaps in the functioning of NHAI. Consequently, the Committee has proposed an external, independent audit to complement internal assessments, to evaluate the effectiveness of NHAI’s organisational structure, the functioning of its different verticals, the adequacy of internal controls and the degree of compliance with statutory and regulatory frameworks.Assessments of the planning and execution of highway projects was also proposed, to measure the outcomes in terms of cost, time and quality, and if institutional mechanisms ensure transparency, value for public money and user satisfaction. Eventually, the goal is for NHAI to transform from a tender-awarding construction agency into a mature infrastructure authority focusing on asset creation and management, user-centric service delivery and long-term sustainability.Internal and external audits currently focus on financial, operational and technical aspects such as toll collections, FASTag compliance and quality and safety standards, points out Satyanarayan Purohit, Vice President, Dilip Buildcon. “Broader organisational effectiveness, governance, internal controls or the achievement of long-term strategic objectives are still not being evaluated. But they must be to identify systemic gaps, enhance accountability and ensure value for public money. Ultimately, the goal is to strengthen transparency, improve governance and align operations with national infrastructure goals.”Design oversight Several National Highway projects have been delayed, caused public dissatisfaction and needed to be redesigned because of insufficient consultation with local stakeholders during the detailed project report (DPR) stage. Without local technical expertise and site-specific inputs, essential structures have been missed, stretches have failed, alignments been compromised, terrain and environmental sensitivities been missed, and designs have failed to address local realities, particularly in ecologically sensitive or densely inhabited regions.Pointing out that good quality DPRs are pivotal to the success of highway projects, Rajeev Vijay, Executive Director   Government and Infrastructure Advisory, Knight Frank India, believes insufficient structured engagement with local authorities, technical experts and affected communities has resulted in late-stage design revisions and, in some cases, failure to reflect site-specific engineering insights.“As consultants to both government and private-sector infrastructure agencies, Knight Frank supports the Committee’s recommendation that the road authorities institute a structured and time-bound stakeholder consultation framework during the DPR preparation,” he says. “DPRS typically lay the foundation to first and foremost capturing the needs of the people, meeting technical requirements, mitigating challenges with respect to land, topography, soils, etc, addressing any social and environmental concerns, and meeting the economic and financial viabilities for the Government.”International experience demonstrates that structured consultation frameworks significantly enhance project design and execution, continues Vijay. “Countries such as the US (Federal-Aid Highway Act and associated regulations), UK (Section 47 of the Planning Act 2008), Switzerland (Federal Environmental Impact Assessment Law and cantonal planning and building laws) and Germany have embedded public and stakeholder engagement not only at the environmental impact assessment and land acquisition stages but also during the conceptualisation and design phases of infrastructure projects.”Drawing from these countries’ best practices, Knight Frank believes a codified consultation process during DPR preparation – including local authority coordination, structured public disclosure and feedback integration – would strengthen road authorities’ project design framework and help ensure projects are technically robust, locally responsive and socially sustainable, while reducing time and cost overruns during implementation.Noting that feeding local information into project DPRs is a worldwide standard, Vishwas Jain, Managing Director, Consulting Engineers Group, says, “In India, local populations aren’t consulted the way they should be and, sometimes, the interest of influential parties finds its way into these documents.”Measures also need to be taken to address other reason for low quality DPRs.“While consultants have traditionally been chosen based on quality-cum-cost-based selection, lowering the weightage given to technical qualifications or choosing consultants based on the lowest bid has adversely impacted the quality of the DPRs,” he continues. “Making it mandatory for companies bidding for construction supervision to have some minimum DPR work in hand and DPR experience has also diluted the quality of DPRs. The technical skills of consultants associated with such companies is not on a par with pure-play consultants.”Jain emphasises the need for a system to disallow unrealistically low construction bids or to weed out players who would compromise on the quality of construction by bidding too low. “We need better policies and processes to improve the quality of construction supervision, perhaps by disallowing companies associated with failed stretches of highways,” he says.Implementing independent preconstruction audits would be a better way to enforce accountability than post-failure measures, according to the Committee, which also recommended penal action against errant consultants, engineers and officials who negligently approve flawed designs and the blacklisting of concessionaires who repeatedly fail to deliver.According to Devayan Dey, Partner - Transport, Logistics and Infrastructure, PwC India, these issues are merely symptoms of two larger problems. First, he draws attention to the skilling and talent crisis in the construction industry. “In India, quality education, continuing assessment and rigorous chartership processes to certify competence are missing. These are much needed to instil a mindset of diligence, not just with consultants but across the construction industry at large. Even with the right design, workmanship and diligence during construction are important. However, today, we have more construction managers than people with engineering skillsets who can design and build right. So, while penalisation is needed to an extent, it will not help unless we solve the root cause. Second, we need to think deeply about pay across the infrastructure industry, both in the government and private sectors. Low wages compared to other industries, coupled with a more difficult work environment in construction, discourage the right talent.”Accountability issuesTypically, the responsibility for the detailed engineering design of National Highway projects and translating conceptual designs in the DPR into executable construction drawings is delegated to the concessionaire, vetted by an independent engineer and approved by the authority. The Committee noted that such delegation of responsibility weakens accountability, especially when independent engineers fail to flag design deficiencies. This reflects poorly on the NHAI, while it doesn’t absolve it of its ultimate accountability. The solution, according to the Committee, is not to reduce approvals to procedural formalities and fix full accountability on approving officers.“Institutionalising an inhouse technical review mechanism for the vetting and approval of all critical design elements, such as embankment stability, drainage channels, pavement layering and slope protection, is indeed the answer,” says Purohit, suggesting that the centralised scrutiny be modelled on the same lines as the Federal Highway Administration and Highways, England.By ensuring designs meet stringent quality and sustainability standards, he adds, “the mechanism would safeguard public investment, reinforce NHAI’s authority over highway asset management and ultimately contribute to more durable, user-focused infrastructure development that delivers long-term value.”Subcontracting concernsIndirectly permitting subcontracting has given way to multitier subcontracting. However, as subcontractors might not be accountable under the primary contract framework, enforcing quality standards or timely delivery becomes challenging. In highway projects in Kerala, sizeable differences between the sanctioned cost and the awarded cost of projects have raised questions about whether the implementation has matched the DPR and whether subcontracting at a lower cost has affected the quality and scale of work. Concessionaires subcontracting at a lower cost make a tidy profit without executing any work or any responsibility.Allowing subcontracting only up to a limit and with special approval from NHAI would help improve matters, according to the Committee. Subcontractors should be registered, be given prior approval and be clearly documented. While the concessionaire would remain responsible for completing the work, standard contract formats, such as the Model Concession Agreement, should be revised so that subcontractors can also be held legally responsible. Strong steps must be taken to stop contractors from quoting abysmally low prices just to win tenders.Acknowledging that the Committee-stated solution may be ideal, Dey questions if it is feasible. “Given strained liquidities with most EPC contractors and single-digit margins, completely removing the developer community may not be feasible,” he says. “Overregulation will have its effects.”Instead, he suggests a two-pronged approach, involving enabling the industry with skill and talent and a rigorous focus on monitoring, which can ultimately ensure quality, and taking measures to alleviate financial stress in the industry. The latter would involve easing access to funds for working capital, mandating stricter procurement norms including restricting over-competition and creating a graduation process for companies to qualify for various sizes of works.  Pavement failuresPremature cracks, surface distress and failures in pavement quality concrete, often within a short period of completion, have been seen particularly in rain-prone and low-lying areas on several stretches, such as along the Delhi-Vadodara Expressway. “I have also observed extensive cracks on concrete roads within five years of their completion as against their design life of 30 years,” says Sanjay K Nirmal, Former Director General, MoRTH.While switching from bituminous to concrete roads without adequate assessment has been cited as a reason for this poor quality, the reason for such failures cannot be accurately pinpointed without an audit.  “While contractors commonly attribute pavement failures to overloading or very tight construction schedules, we need a detailed technical audit of such stretches by a third party to ascertain the real reason for their failure where plenty of other stretches are performing satisfactorily even after 20 years,” agrees Nirmal. “The reason could be poor compaction of underlying layers, use of substandard material, inadequate curing, and not using skilled manpower and proper machinery for the construction of pavements.”Unrealistically short timeframes now allotted for the construction of large rigid pavements, typically 18-24 months, occasionally extended to 30 months, to design and construct an eight-lane expressway stretch of about 30 km are a core challenge, says Atasi Das, Assistant Vice President, GR Infraprojects.“Concrete inherently requires 28 days of proper curing to gain design strength and no chemical or compound can safely accelerate this process without compromising long-term durability. Further, time pressures often rush compaction, so that while the compacted earth passes density tests at the surface, it remains under-compacted internally. Such embankments gradually settle with the weight of traffic, sometimes causing even slight vertical movements that can translate into cracking, faulting and slab breakage in the rigid pavement above.”Das points out that in many developed countries, rigid pavements are executed across multiple seasons to ensure foundation stability. “Concrete cannot be hurried by administrative targets – it follows the laws of hydration and time,” she says. “We used to allow 48 to 60 months for the design and construction of such projects.”The solution isn’t to abandon concrete pavements but, as the Committee has proposed, to mandate an evidence-based framework for pavement-type selection at the DPR stage, and base this on updated geotechnical and hydrological investigations, lifecycle cost analysis and third-party technical audits during design and after construction.“Many DPRs are prepared years before award and construction,” points out Das. For example, DPRs for the Mumbai-Vadodara Expressway, prepared around 2009-2010, were implemented after 2020, by which time axle loads, traffic volume and material sources had all changed significantly. Borrow areas identified a decade earlier were no longer viable, yet the designs proceeded without revalidation.“In parallel, widespread material shortages and weak audit mechanisms have led to inconsistent results,” she continues. “With hundreds of projects running concurrently, quality aggregates and binders are scarce, substitutions are made without redesign and audits often remain paper-based.”Service roadsService roads are lifelines of local mobility and inclusion that connect highways to communities, ensuring that highways safely serve both long-distance travellers and locals; they aren’t auxiliary features, according to Keshab Charan Das, General Manager (Business Development, Estimation & Costing), GR Infraprojects. “Sustainable highway development must rest on this equitable and connected foundation.” However, at present, service roads, intended to segregate slow-moving local traffic from high-speed vehicular flow, are frequently omitted, incomplete or poorly designed, a neglect reflecting deeper structural deficiencies in planning, design and accountability within the country’s highway development framework, he avers.“Regarding service roads as peripheral additions rather than integral components of the overall highway design leads to hastily finalised alignment, connectivity and drainage systems, with insufficient coordination between land acquisition, construction sequencing, and local access requirements,” says Keshab Charan Das. “This inconsistency is widespread across both national and state highways, where service roads appear only near urban clusters or major junctions, leaving long stretches disconnected, forcing slow-moving vehicles and pedestrians onto the high-speed lanes, which not only endangers lives but also defeats the very principle of access-controlled highway design.” Hence, the Committee has recommended prescribing a uniform minimum standard width and construction quality for service roads, similar to highways, proportionate to their expected traffic load, so that they remain navigable throughout the project lifecycle. Their alignment, structural integrity, connectivity, signage and drainage features must be finalised at the DPR stage itself, suggestions he agrees with. Nirmal points out that a manual of specifications clearly prescribes the design traffic, formation and carriageway width of service roads along National Highways. “If the implementing agency enforces these specifications and codal requirements for service roads, their quality can be improved like any other new road. Unfortunately, this is often neglected, resulting in very poor conditions of service roads.”Toll rationalisationToll on National Highways is currently linked to base rates fixed in 2008 with the provision for a 3 per cent annual escalation with partial indexation to the Wholesale Price Index, irrespective of the quality of the road, traffic volume or user affordability.The Committee has proposed setting up a tariff authority to ensure transparency and fairness in toll fixation, collection and regulation and revisions.The Committee also questioned the concept of “tolling in perpetuity” and the absence of an “institutional mechanism to independently evaluate whether toll charges are justified in relation to the actual operation and maintenance costs or future service requirements”. After capital and routine maintenance costs have been recovered, toll collection on any highway stretch must be rationalised and substantially reduced, and continuation permitted only if it is “clearly justified and approved by the proposed independent oversight authority”.The basic premise for a highway or improved road is time and cost savings, observes Amol S Khair, Managing Director, Aakar Abhinav Consultants. “If a toll road doesn’t fulfil this objective, corrective action obviously needs to be taken up, such as reducing the toll. This depends on the average speed achieved on the highway using technology to measure. And, yes, after the capital cost and maintenance cost are recovered, the toll collection should stop.”Pointing out that the India highways ecosystem is at an inflection point, where transparency, user experience and reliability will define the next phase of growth, Dr Zafar Khan, Executive Director and Joint Chief Executive Officer, Vertis Infrastructure Trust, brings up the need for highway operators to not only ensure upkeep and maintenance but also focus on providing better amenities and a smoother flow of traffic to be able to capitalise and maximise their revenues.“A toll plaza, therefore, not only becomes a revenue generator, but a critical cog in enabling a smoother drive experience,” he says. “It should be fair, efficient and service-linked, not merely revenue-linked. While technology becomes the enabler, governance and accountability will ultimately determine trust.”Keshab Charan Das points out that tolling users of highways whose service roads have not been completed, or which are in a state of disrepair because local bodies lack the financial resources and jurisdictional clarity to maintain them, raises ethical questions. “Why should users continue to pay toll when the essential supporting infrastructure remains incomplete or unsafe?” he questions. “Such deficiencies are especially visible in newly commissioned highway and expressway projects, where the emphasis often lies on opening the main carriageway for tolling rather than completing ancillary infrastructure.”Toll refundUnder the National Highways Fee (Determination of Rates and Collection) Rules, 2008, toll is explicitly charged for highway-related services. Section 10 of the National Highways Authority of India Act, 1988, mandates that sound business principles must be upheld – but they aren’t always. Toll continues to be collected even where the service isn’t available because highway stretches are incomplete, under prolonged construction, or marked by grave safety and traffic flow deficiencies. No institutional mechanism exists for refunding or waiving toll in such cases.To uphold the principle of quid pro quo and strengthen public confidence in the legitimacy of user charges, the Committee has recommended instituting a clear, technology-driven and transparent mechanism, fully integrated with the electronic toll collection framework for automatic toll refund or waiver.“The collection of toll should start only after the work is substantially competed,” agrees Khair. “Toll should be proportionately reduced or waived off completely if real-time journey speeds drop severely due to highway maintenance works, bad riding quality, capacity augmentation works, etc. Toll should also be reduced if periodic safety audits throw up serious deficiencies. Reducing toll would be easier to implement than toll refund.” Tolling safeguardsMultilane free-flow tolling using AI-based automatic number plate recognition and global navigation satellite system technologies is being rolled out despite continuing issues with the existing FASTag tolling system, such as failed reads and vehicle pileups. Inconsistent ground-level enforcement and the lack of uniformly functional RFID infrastructure cause avoidable congestion and user dissatisfaction. Toll plazas often lack onsite facilities for users to recharge, purchase or replace their FASTags, compelling them to rely on potentially unreliable issuer bank websites or third-party applications. Grievance redressal mechanisms for delays or errors are weak. Physical enforcement is inadequate, especially in high traffic locations.Therefore, the Committee has proposed creating a real-time toll plaza performance dashboard, plugging FASTag deficiencies and supporting multilane free-flow tolling by a regulatory framework for accuracy and user privacy. “Multilane free flow tolling represents a transformative opportunity for eliminating physical choke points, reducing leakages and offering real-time transparency to both users and operators,” according to Dr Khan. However, he says, “Success will depend not on flashy pilots but on the system’s reliability under all conditions. It will need to be engineered for uptime, accuracy and redundancy, with strict service-level commitments and transparent reporting that motorists can see. Coupled with corridor-level performance dashboards, a robust grievance redressal and strong data governance frameworks that protect user privacy while ensuring fair billing will ensure that drive experience is always at an optimum.”“Introducing and scrupulously following uniform specifications for FASTag reading machines and toll collection infrastructure are the need of the hour,” says Khair, with heavy penalties for defaulting O&M contract monitoring agencies entrusted with the installation and working of toll collection equipment. Further, transparency demands that service timings and queue lengths be displayed at each toll plaza and the toll be proportionally exempted where these limits are crossed, he adds. “A strong, independent, hassle-free grievance redressal mechanism is needed.”Khair also proposes some basic educational qualification and training for toll plaza operating staff. Unauthorised tollingInstances of unauthorised toll collection on National Highways indicate serious enforcement and monitoring deficiencies that cause a loss of revenue and erode public trust in the tolling system.The Committee has recommended real-time GPS-based mapping and geofencing of authorised toll plazas, deployment of CCTV and drone surveillance on vulnerable stretches, and periodic joint inspections by the authorities and law enforcement agencies to ease the identification of the correct toll plaza location. Specific obligations for the prevention of unauthorised tolling and diversion should be included in toll concession agreements, with appropriate time-bound penalties for non-compliance. Further, details of authorised toll plazas should be made publically available. To improve transparency in tolling, the Committee has recommended that the MoRTH and NHAI urgently develop and implement a toll integrity and enforcement framework.“If someone is collecting toll through unauthorised or fake toll plazas, it obviously indicates that maybe the officers from the authority the highway falls under are in collusion with those collecting fake tolls,” says Khair.  “Departments have a mechanism and procedure to punish those who are guilty of fraud. The bottom line is the need to work with the utmost sincerity and strong ethical values. Legal action against the guilty should be swift and strict, only then can it act as a deterrent.” Emergency and safety mechanismsDespite provisions in project guidelines and concession agreements, real-time emergency response to accidents falls short, which causes preventable loss of life and grievous injuries, particularly at identified black spots. Instead of project-specific arrangements, the Committee has called for uniform national standards for a holistic emergency response system across the highway network, which Ashwini Bagga, Public-Sector Strategist and Road Safety Innovation Leader with a Government Advisory Role, says, “would not work because standards depend on multiple factors such as the category of road (expressway, National Highway, other road), area (urban, rural), terrain (plain, rolling, hill) and other geographical constraints, such as coast-side or desert area.”Consider greenfield expressways, he urges. “Without a video incident detection and enforcement system, it would take considerable time to respond to accidents on controlled-access, high-speed corridors bereft of bystanders and closed to other traffic. On these, the emergency response would be solely dependent on NHAI ambulances. Guidelines prescribe speed-detection cameras to be installed at every 10 km and pan-tilt-zoom cameras at every 1 km to capture major incidents, which is sufficient to get real-time alerts about a crash. But this isn’t happening.”Bagga shares the example of a fatal accident on September 14, 2025. Seven people were killed when their car lost control, hit a divider, and plunged into a water-filled underpass on the Jaipur Ring Road, a four-lane controlled access highway. The underpass was not in use and the crashed vehicle wasn’t noticed until the ensuing day. The questions to ask, he says, are: Why was the crash not detected? Might the outcome have been different if an incident detection system had been in place?While Bagga points out that a government-aided air ambulance system for quick emergency response is still a dream, as are designated trauma centres across the expressways, trauma stabilisation units at regular intervals should be implemented.“In hilly terrains, the average response time and protocols for emergency response are understandably different because rescue and relief efforts are constrained,” he continues. The Committee has also recommended a framework for the rectification and real-time monitoring of black spots, which, in Bagga’s view, is “the need of the hour”.Noting that many road fatalities occur owing to inconsistent design transitions, unsafe access points, inadequate signage and the absence of forgiving roadside features, Satish Pandey, Senior Principal Scientist and Head, Flexible Pavement Division, CSIR-Central Road Research Institute, New Delhi; Professor, Academy of Scientific and Industrial Research; and Officer on Board for new technology applications, Border Road Organisation, points out that MoRTH and NHAI are implementing systematic safety measures such as mandatory road safety audits at the DPR, construction and operation stages, blackspot rectification using data from the Integrated Road Accident Database (iRAD), median barriers, crash cushions, and rumble strips based on IRC:SP:88 and IRC:103 design standards. Upcoming access-controlled expressways are being equipped with advanced features such as AI and drone-based real-time monitoring systems for identifying unsafe segments.The CSIR-Central Road Research Institute is contributing design standards and guidelines for safer road networks, such as Intelligent Solutions for Road Safety through Technology and Engineering (iRaste), road safety audit training programmes and riding quality improvement through instant pothole repair technique ECOFIX.“With the establishment of the National Road Safety Board and integration of Vision Zero principles, India is moving toward evidence-based, proactive safety management ensuring that the expanding road length is matched by expanding safety performance,” observes Pandey, while emphasising that “the traditional focus on road expansion and capacity augmentation must evolve toward safe system design where the road, vehicle and user collectively minimise the impact of human error leading to accidents”.Proposed quotes:Broader organisational effectiveness, governance, internal controls or the achievement of long-term strategic objectives are still not being evaluated. - Satyanarayan Purohit, Vice President, Dilip BuildconKnight Frank supports the recommendation that the road authorities institute a structured and time-bound stakeholder consultation framework during DPR preparation. - Rajeev Vijay, Executive Director, Government and Infrastructure Advisory, Knight Frank IndiaIn India, sometimes, the interest of influential parties finds its way into DPRs. - Vishwas Jain, Managing Director, Consulting Engineers GroupToday, we have more construction managers than people with engineering skillsets who can design and build right. - Devayan Dey, Partner - Transport, Logistics and Infrastructure, PwC IndiaI have observed extensive cracks on concrete roads within five years of their completion as against their design life of 30 years. - Sanjay K Nirmal, Former Director General, MoRTHIn many developed countries, rigid pavements are executed across multiple seasons to ensure foundation stability. - Atasi Das, Assistant Vice President, GR InfraprojectsService roads' alignment, structural integrity, connectivity, signage and drainage features must be finalised at the DPR stage itself. - Keshab Charan Das, General Manager (Business Development, Estimation & Costing), GR InfraprojectsA toll plaza should be fair, efficient and service-linked, not merely revenue-linked. - Dr Zafar Khan, Executive Director and Joint Chief Executive Officer, Vertis Infrastructure TrustToll should be proportionately reduced or waived off completely if real-time journey speeds drop severely. - Amol S Khair, Managing Director, Aakar Abhinav ConsultantsA framework for the rectification and real-time monitoring of black spots is the need of the hour. - Ashwini Bagga, Public Sector Strategist and Road Safety Innovation Leader with a Government Advisory RoleThe traditional focus on road expansion and capacity augmentation must evolve toward safe system design. - Satish Pandey, Senior Principal Scientist and Head, Flexible Pavement Division, CSIR-Central Road Research Institute, New Delhi; Professor, Academy of Scientific and Industrial Research; and Officer on Board for new technology applications, Border Road Organisation