Kherki Daula Toll Shift Enters Denotification Stage

GURUGRAM: The long-promised relocation of the Kherki Daula toll plaza has moved into a formal regulatory stage, with the National Highways Authority of India beginning the process to denotify the existing site and notify a new facility near Kukdola. The change has not happened yet: toll collection at Kherki Daula continues while approvals, design and construction move forward.

The new location is about 12 kilometres towards Pachgaon, close to Kukdola and Sehrawan. NHAI expects the notification process to take three to four months. Officials have indicated that building the toll facility and installing its gantries could extend the shift to roughly five months, although such timelines remain subject to statutory and construction progress.

New plaza is planned without conventional barriers

The proposed facility is intended to use multi-lane free-flow tolling. Instead of vehicles lining up at booths and waiting for a barrier to rise, overhead gantries would identify and charge eligible vehicles as they pass. The promise is smoother movement with less idling, but the result will depend on reliable tag reading, accurate vehicle records and a fair process for disputed transactions.

Relocation will also change the effective tollable distance between facilities. NHAI has said charges at the Bijwasan plaza on Dwarka Expressway and the Shahjahanpur plaza on the Delhi-Jaipur highway will be recalculated under the applicable formula. No revised fee should be assumed until the competent authority publishes it.

The move was announced politically as far back as 2016 and received Union transport ministry approval in May 2025. Progress was repeatedly delayed by land availability, litigation, local opposition, environmental and security questions. Finalising Kukdola gives the project a location; denotification gives it a legal path. Neither step by itself removes the existing booths.

Commuters need a transparent transition plan

Before commissioning, NHAI should explain how free-flow charging will work for vehicles without a readable tag, what signage will appear before the gantries and where users can contest an incorrect deduction. The authority must also prevent a period in which motorists are charged inconsistently across old and new systems.

The traffic effect will be felt beyond the toll line. Kherki Daula sits beside dense residential, office and industrial movement in Manesar and new Gurugram. Removing stop-start queues could ease a chronic bottleneck, but shifting the collection point closer to the KMP interchange may create a new concentration of merging traffic unless lane geometry and enforcement are designed carefully.

For nearby villages, access arrangements are equally important. Local trips should not be forced into unsafe turns or long detours by fencing and gantries. Service roads, pedestrian movement and emergency access need to be shown in the final layout rather than addressed after construction.

The latest development is therefore meaningful but procedural. The clearest signs of irreversible progress will be publication of the new notification, visible construction at Kukdola and a commissioning date backed by a tested payment system. Until then, the Kherki Daula plaza remains in place and commuters should treat any claim that it has already shifted as premature.