ED searches 14 sites over alleged fake software at NHAI toll plazas

The Enforcement Directorate's Lucknow zonal office began searches on 2 September at 14 premises in a money-laundering case about toll collection at National Highways Authority of India plazas. The raids run under Section 17 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Jammu, Madhya Pradesh, the National Capital Region and Kolkata.

The predicate file is FIR No. 17 dated 22 January 2025. The ED registered ECIR/ASZO/04/2025 on 19 May 2025. Two police FIRs allege that unauthorised software was installed at plazas to print receipts that never entered NHAI's official books, and that the cash those receipts represented was diverted.

ED officials said forensic examination and records taken from NHAI corroborate that such software was in use. The searches are meant to pull devices and documents, name the people who benefited, and follow the money. Further investigation is underway. No charge sheet and no attachment in this specific toll file were announced with the raids.

How a plaza fraud is supposed to work

A highway plaza is a cash-and-digital till. Official software is meant to record every vehicle, print a receipt that matches the lane camera, and send the take to the concessionaire and then to NHAI under the contract. If a second application sits on the same machine, or on a second machine in the booth, it can print a slip that looks real to the driver while the official ledger stays blank. The difference is cash that never becomes a government receivable.

That is the allegation, not a finding of guilt. The ED still has to show who wrote or bought the software, which plazas ran it, how much moved, and where it went. Digital evidence is the reason the searches started at 14 addresses on the same morning.

Why the case sits under PMLA

Toll leakage is first a theft or cheating file for the police. It becomes a PMLA file when the agency argues that the diverted collections are proceeds of crime that were placed, layered or integrated. Section 17 lets officers search and seize while that argument is built. Attachments, if they come, will be a later step. On Tuesday the same directorate provisionally attached Rs 3.31 crore in an unrelated minerals case, a reminder that the PMLA toolkit is being used on several tracks at once.

NHAI toll is one of the most visible taxes a driver pays. If a parallel receipt system ran on official plazas, the loss is not only to the authority. It is to every user who paid the listed rate while part of the lane was off the books. The 14 searches are the first public move to put a number on that gap.