The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) in a Right To Information (RTI) reply to DNA has said that no data is available on the number of vehicles that did not pay toll or those that were exempted from paying toll for plying on Bandra-Worli Sea Link (BWSL).
The vehicles that are exempted from paying toll for plying on the 5.6-km-long Sea Link are those meant for VIPs, such as MPs, MLAs, MLCs, defence vehicles, police, ambulances, fire-fighting vehicles, governors of state, president and vice-president. However, MSRDC replied saying there is no data available on these vehicles. It began collecting toll in the year 2009.
Currently, around 40,000 vehicles ply on BWSL daily, which became operational after an expenditure of around Rs 1,600 crore. The BWSL is also the first sea link to be constructed in India.
Further, toll activists such as Sanjay Shirodkar have slammed MSRDC citing that data on exempted vehicles using five entry and exit points of the city and Mumbai-Pune Expressway is available, then why is that of BWSL a mystery.
However, MEP, the toll collection contractor of BWSL, said, "MEP shares toll collection data through EDI (electronic data interchange) on a real time basis with the concerned authority. In the last six months, we have successfully managed the implementation of dedicated ETC lanes and hybrid lanes at RGSL, thereby allowing us to register every transaction (without having vehicles to queue up). The same data is shared with the authority through EDI."
Meanwhile, Vijay Waghmare, Joint Managing Director, MSRDC, said, "We can only give information that we have; we are not keeping any data from anyone, considering it is not even alarming. Currently, the contractor claims the exemption traffic to be of around 5-6 per cent, which is not alarming. Also, exemption does not hit the state government or the MSRDC but the toll collection contractor. So it was only in this context the RTI reply said that data is not available."
