India's Highways Need a Green Policy Reset

Editorial Summary: The Indian Express argues that India’s expressway expansion under Bharatmala Pariyojana and PM Gati Shakti is outpacing its environmental safeguards. The Green Highways Policy 2015 has produced thin plantation outcomes, the environmental clearance regime evaluates projects in isolation rather than at landscape level, and EV-ready charging corridors lag construction. A policy reset must integrate biodiversity audits, mandatory wildlife corridor design, native-species afforestation and life-cycle carbon accounting into NHAI project sanctioning.

The Scale of the Expansion

India’s National Highway (NH) network has grown faster in the past decade than at any time in its history.

The acceleration is anchored in three policy instruments — the Bharatmala Pariyojana (sanctioned 2017), the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan for Multi-modal Connectivity (2021) integrating road, rail, port and logistics planning, and the National Infrastructure Pipeline providing fiscal framework continuity.

The expansion has reshaped logistics costs, freight movement, and inter-regional access. It has also created an environmental footprint whose magnitude India’s safeguard architecture was not designed to absorb at this pace.

The Green Highways Policy 2015

The Green Highways (Plantation, Transplantation, Beautification and Maintenance) Policy 2015 was a flagship environmental initiative of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.

Design

• 1% of the total project cost is to be earmarked for plantation along National Highways
• The policy aspires to plant approximately one crore trees annually along NH corridors
• The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is the implementation agency

The Implementation Gap

In practice, the policy has under-delivered:

• Monsoon-bunched plantation drives concentrate planting into a short window, straining seedling logistics and survival.
• Survival rates of 30-50% are routinely reported, well below the ecological design assumption.
• Exotic-species choices — chosen for fast canopy and visual effect — provide weaker carbon sequestration, lower native biodiversity support and higher pest vulnerability than indigenous species.
• Thin agency capacity at NHAI for post-plantation maintenance, monitoring and audit means survival data is often unreliable.

The policy is not failing because the framework is wrong; it is under-delivering because the implementation system treats plantation as a numerical accounting exercise rather than an ecological intervention.

The Clearance Regime — Project-by-Project, Not Landscape

India’s environmental clearance regime evaluates highway projects in isolation rather than as cumulative landscape interventions.

The Statutory Framework

The Cumulative Impact Problem

A single highway segment may receive clearance because its individual impact on a protected area appears manageable. But the cumulative impact of multiple highways, railway lines, transmission corridors and pipelines — all linear infrastructure — fragments wildlife habitat in ways that no individual project assessment captures.

Wildlife corridors such as Kanha-Pench, Kaziranga, Mukundra-Ranthambhore and Bandipur-Mudumalai are landscape-scale ecological networks that span multiple states and multiple project jurisdictions. A project-level EIA cannot, by design, evaluate cumulative landscape impact.

Wildlife Corridor Pressure

Linear intrusions through wildlife habitat have known ecological consequences.

• Genetic isolation: Populations separated by busy corridors lose genetic connectivity over generations, raising extinction risk.
• Road kill: Estimates by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) place vertebrate road-kill mortality in the tens of thousands annually across Indian highways — covering snakes, amphibians, small mammals, birds and occasional large carnivores.
• Behavioural disruption: Noise, light pollution and traffic frequency alter animal movement patterns, feeding behaviour and reproductive success even where direct mortality is absent.

Judicial and Administrative Interventions

• Bandipur-Mudumalai night traffic ban (2009): The Supreme Court restricted night-time vehicular movement through Bandipur Tiger Reserve to reduce wildlife mortality — a precedent that has been litigated and partially extended.
• Mitigation infrastructure: Underpasses on the Kaziranga corridor, eco-bridges on the Pench corridor, and elevated stretches in some Western Ghats projects represent India’s growing — but still patchy — adoption of corridor design.
• State-level wildlife boards evaluate diversions, but their consultative weight in NHAI sanctioning remains advisory rather than determinative.

The EV Charging Corridor Lag

India’s electric mobility transition depends on charging infrastructure that follows — and ideally anticipates — highway expansion.

Implementation has lagged construction. Long-route EV adoption remains constrained by range anxiety even on flagship corridors. Toll plazas — natural rest and recharge nodes — have not been mandated to host charging infrastructure as a default.

Climate Accounting and Life-Cycle Assessment

Highway construction is carbon-intensive. Cement and steel — the principal embodied inputs — together account for a meaningful share of India’s industrial CO2 emissions. Bitumen adds petroleum-derived emissions. Earthworks, vehicle fleet emissions during construction, and post-completion induced traffic add further.

Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) — the methodology for measuring environmental impact across construction, operation and end-of-life phases — is not yet mandated in NHAI Detailed Project Reports or bid contracts. Without LCA, project comparisons (alignment options, material choices, design alternatives) cannot incorporate climate trade-offs systematically.

Carbon credit eligibility for highway-linked plantation, EV charging and material substitution remains limited under India’s domestic carbon market design.

Comparative Practice

Linear infrastructure jurisdictions globally have developed structural ecological integration.

The comparator point is not that India should adopt these frameworks wholesale but that ecology as a structural input — not as mitigation after design — is the global direction of travel.

Way Forward

The Indian Express recommends a five-part reset:

1. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) at corridor level under the EIA framework — assessing cumulative landscape impacts before individual project clearances.
2. Mandatory wildlife corridor design via Wildlife Institute of India (WII) consultation for all NH segments traversing protected areas or notified corridors — with underpasses, eco-bridges and elevated stretches as design defaults, not exceptions.
3. Native-species afforestation with measurable survival targets, third-party audit, and post-plantation maintenance contracts of at least five years — replacing the current accounting-based plantation model.
4. Life-Cycle Assessment integration into NHAI Detailed Project Reports and bid contracts, with material substitution incentives for low-carbon cement and steel.
5. EV-ready charging infrastructure at every toll plaza by 2027 under PM e-DRIVE — making charging follow construction rather than lag it.

UPSC Mains Analysis

GS Paper 3 — Environment, Economy and Infrastructure

• Environmental statutes: EIA Notification 2006, Forest (Conservation) Act 1980, Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023, Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972
• Highway development: Bharatmala Pariyojana, PM Gati Shakti, National Infrastructure Pipeline
• EV transition: FAME II, PM e-DRIVE, NHEV pilots
• Climate: Life-Cycle Assessment, embodied carbon in cement and steel
• Institutional: NHAI, Wildlife Institute of India, BNHS, Bureau of Energy Efficiency

Keywords: Green Highways Policy 2015, Bharatmala Pariyojana, PM Gati Shakti, EIA Notification 2006, Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023, Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, Bandipur night ban 2009, Kanha-Pench corridor, Wildlife Institute of India, Strategic Environmental Assessment, Life-Cycle Assessment, FAME II, PM e-DRIVE, NHEV, Habitats Directive, Natura 2000.

Editorial Insight

India’s highway expansion is one of the most visible achievements of its infrastructure decade. Its environmental footprint is, however, accumulating faster than its safeguard architecture is being modernised. The Indian Express’s underlying argument is that ecology cannot remain a compliance ritual at the end of project design; it must enter the bid contract, the Detailed Project Report, the corridor-level assessment, and the toll plaza specification. A reset is not anti-development. It is the only path on which the next 60,000 km of highways do not come at the cost of the wildlife corridors, native forests and climate budget that the first 1,46,000 km have already drawn down.

Source: The Indian Express