Tamil Nadu's first booth-less toll plaza goes live at Paranur

The Paranur toll plaza on the Chennai–Tiruchi National Highway has become Tamil Nadu's first booth-less facility, with a multi-lane free-flow (MLFF) system switching on from Wednesday night, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) told The Hindu.

Instead of queues at manned cabins, tall gantries now carry RFID readers, radar scanners, audit cameras and a FASTag-linked automatic number-plate recognition system. Tags are read a little ahead of the old plaza point, so vehicles with a valid FASTag — or exempt tags for judges, collectors, MPs and MLAs — can pass without stopping.

How enforcement works

Drivers without a FASTag, or with too little balance, will be issued challans rather than stopped at a booth. NHAI sources said the design is meant to cut congestion and speed the roughly 46,500 vehicles that use Paranur each day — one of the busier plazas on the corridor that feeds pilgrim towns, industrial clusters around Chengalpattu and the road south towards Tiruchi and Madurai.

Officials expect the biggest immediate benefit during the festive season, when traffic south from Chennai typically surges. Free-flow tolling has already been rolled out on selected national highway stretches elsewhere in India; Paranur is the State's first such plaza, and a test case for whether gantry-based enforcement can replace the familiar stop-and-go booth culture.

What travellers should check

Commuters are being advised to keep FASTag balances topped up and to ensure the tag is correctly affixed and linked to the vehicle registration. Exempt category users should carry the documentation their tag requires. Anyone who disputes a challan will need to use the usual NHAI and FASTag issuer grievance channels once notices arrive — a process that can take days, so drivers who regularly use the corridor have an incentive to get the tag right before the festival rush.

Transport unions and fleet operators will watch two numbers: average delay at Paranur compared with the old booth layout, and the share of challans issued for insufficient balance versus missing tags. If challans spike without a matching drop in travel time, pressure will grow for more customer education — or for temporary help desks near the gantries.

The Justice will track whether average travel times between Chennai and Tiruchi improve over the coming festive weeks, and whether other Tamil Nadu plazas on NH corridors are next in NHAI's MLFF queue.