Intuitively, a toll road company should want traffic.
More cars, more tolls, more revenue, it seems like the whole point of building the road.
But a large share of India's national highways today are built under a model where the private company that constructs the road gets paid on a schedule that has nothing to do with how many vehicles ever use it, and the government, not the developer, absorbs the risk of an empty highway.
What the government actually built to fix a broken system
This is the Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM), approved by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs in January 2016 and issued as a circular by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways the following month.
