The Maharashtra Road Safety Council member, Chandmal Parmar, questioned the rationale of the increasing the toll charges on the Pune-Mumbai expressway by 18%.
The Maharashtra Road Safety Council member, Chandmal Parmar, questioned the rationale of the increasing the toll charges on the Pune-Mumbai expressway by 18%. He demanded greater transparency and intervention by state government.
“The feedback that I have got is that IRB has collected Rs1209 crore as toll charges till the last financial year ever since it bagged the contract for this task from the state government in 2004. The company had projected a collection of Rs606.05 crore during these seven years. So when the collection has exceeded what was envisaged, there is no need to increase the toll charges in future,” Parmar said.
IRB has bagged the contract to collect toll charges and maintain the expressway for a period of 15 years from 2004. The contract permits an 18% increase in toll rates every three years. The new toll charges at the expressway came into force from Friday. For cars the toll charges have gone up to Rs165 from Rs140.
A day earlier, the city based RTI Forum for Instant Information had questioned the failure of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) to monitor the toll collection by IRB and validate its data about vehicular traffic on the expressway. The RTI Forum had also expressed its anguish that the toll charges have been increased despite IRB’s collection exceeding the investments that it had made to bag the contract.
“It seems that MSRDC is helpless on this issue. Or else it would have surely kept a tab on the toll collection,” Parmar said. He also said that the high toll rates were not justified as the maintenance of the expressway was unsatisfactory.
Parmar also alleged that IRB has failed to maintain the expressway in a proper manner. “The state accident prevention committee, of which I am a member, had inspected the expressway in December and detected eight cracks which needed repairs. But it is yet to be done,” he said.
“In the first two months of 2011, 42 deaths have already taken place in the expressway. It is imperative for the IRB and MSRDC to take adequate measures to reduce fatalities and mishaps on the expressway,” Parmar demanded.
A delegation of MCCIA, he added, would be meeting the chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, to draw his attention to the poor upkeep of the expressway.
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