Green Highways Policy

• The government launched its Green Highways (Plantation, Transplantation, Beautification & Maintenance) Policy 2015, the aim of which is to help the environment, help local communities, and generate employment by planting trees along all the highways in the country.
• The target for the first year is to plant trees along 6,000 km of highways.
• Under this policy, every year 1 per cent of the total cost of highway projects will go the Green Highways Fund. That works out to around Rs 1,000 crore every year. The Ministry is also focusing on land acquisition for this.

The vision of the policy:

To develop eco-friendly National Highways with the participation of the community, farmers, NGOs, private sector, institutions, government agencies and the Forest Department for economic growth and development in a sustainable manner.

The objectives of the policy:

1. Developing a policy framework for the plantation of trees along highways
2. Reducing the impact of air pollution and dust
3. Providing shade on glaring hot roads during summer
4. Reducing the impact of noise pollution and soil erosion
5. Preventing the glare from the headlights of incoming vehicles
6. Generating employment
7. Help in achieving the country’s forest cover target (The National Forest Policy mandate is for a forest cover of 33 per cent of the country’s land area. Currently, only 22 per cent is covered by forests. This difference can be met only through the planting of trees outside the forest areas)

• The Policy envisages a strict system of auditing whereby money will be released by the government to the empanelled agencies only if they have achieved a survival rate of 90 per cent the previous year.
• The policy will focus on planting indigenous trees only.
• There will be a strong monitoring mechanism in place by using ISRO’s Bhuvan and GAGAN satellite systems. Every planted tree will be counted and auditing will be done. The agencies performing well will receive annual awards.
• The first round of empanelment of organisations that will undertake the planting and maintenance of the trees will begin next week.