‘Toll deducted but car was at home’

At least three FASTag users from Bengaluru have received messages about toll deductions when their cars were parked at home.

About a month ago, Jenil Jain received an alert on his phone that Rs 60 had been collected at a toll booth along the Bengaluru-Mangaluru Highway. Jenil was at home. 

He ran to the parking area to see if his car or his FASTag sticker had gone missing. “Both were in their place,” the software developer says. “We live along Haralur-Sarjapur Road, about 50 km from this toll booth. I don’t remember the last time I crossed this toll gate.”

His FASTag account is linked to PayTM payments bank. “I raised a ticket and got a refund but it took a month,” he says.

Allen James lost Rs 30 similarly, and at the same toll gate. This was on September 15. “I was in the office when I got an alert. I called up my brother to check if he was travelling. I had lent him my car a week earlier. He said ‘no’. He was at home, watching TV. He confirmed the car was at home,” he says.

Worried that somebody was misusing his FASTag or bank credentials, Allen kept an eye on his SMS for a few hours. “I thought the person may cross another toll gate and use my FASTag again. Since that didn’t happen, I brushed it aside as a one-off incident,” says Allen, who lives in Kothanur, about 30 km from the toll gate.

Allen didn’t raise a complaint with HDFC Bank, with which his FASTag account is associated. “The amount was too small to spend my time and effort chasing a refund,” he says.

For the same reason, Rakhi Anil did not seek a refund when her husband’s FASTag account was targeted. “It happened a month ago. He called from the office to check if I was out in our car. But I was home,” says the C V Raman Nagar resident.

Wrong FASTag deduction is being discussed on Reddit as well. A user’s query drew multiple responses recounting similar experiences. 

The service representative told me it happens in cases where the toll booth operator manually enters the registration number and they could have mistyped (sic), a user wrote in response.

One Reddit user said he got the money back in a week, another said it took three months. A third said he didn’t get his money back.

Software glitch?

The deductions in the case of Jenil, Allen and this Reddit user happened at the Navayuga Bengalooru tollway. Toll in-charge Ajay Singh said there could be aberrations but they were rare. He blamed it on “software issues” or when the scanner doesn’t read the vehicle number properly. “We are installing new software,” he told Metrolife.

People can report their grievances on Navayuga’s helpline number 93533 77195, he said.

K B Jayakumar, project director of National Highways Authority of India, Bengaluru, said glitches in the Toll Management System (TMS) software could have caused the problem. It was upgraded sometime in September. The TMS is upgraded every three to five years but the latest version was working fine, he said.

How to report?

People can call toll-free helpline 1033 or contact the toll manager, whose number is given at the toll plaza.

Raise a complaint with the FASTag issuing bank. Helpline numbers listed on npci.org.in