The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways plans to map trees along the 96,000 km long national highways using geo-tagging. This system of tree-counting using space technology will not just help the Government maintain a database of all the new trees planted but will help in monitoring their survival rate post-plantation. The Ministry plans to pump in close to Rs5,000 crore in planting trees along the highways and expressways in the next five years.
“We will invest close to Rs5,000 crore in the coming five years towards planting new trees along the 96,000 km of roadways. We will follow the same policy for our seven new expressways, which also will be developed into green corridors,” said Nitin Gadkari, Minister for Road Transport & Highways, on Tuesday.
“We will put in place a robust system for auditing all new plantations. We are in advanced talks with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for monitoring all trees along the national highways using Gagan and Bhuvan satellites, which are based on the remote sensing system and are GPS-aided,” he said. Gadkari was speaking at the launch of the Green Highways Policy.
Gadkari said that the Ministry plans to set up a “controlling and monitoring system” with ISRO which will be instrumental in conducting frequent audits to ensure complete transparency in the project functioning.
“Under this initiative we will involve members of local community, farmers, former officials from the department of forests, and non-Government organisations. We hope to provide employment to at least 5 lakh people under the programme,” the Minister added.
As per the policy, the National Highways Authority of India ( NHAI) will act as a fund manager for maintaining a green fund and releasing payments based on the recommendation of concerned officials and agencies.
Road, Transport and Highways Secretary Vijay Chhibber said the forest cover at present was only at 22 per cent of the land mass out of desired 33 per cent and the policy would play a pivotal role in bridging the gap of 11 per cent.
“So far, we have identified 12,000 hectares of land for plantation and in the first year we plan to convert at least 6,000 km of roads into green corridors,” said Chhibber.
This initiative of increasing the green cover is aimed at reducing environmental pollution, besides creating natural resources.
The Indian road network 48 lakh km is the second largest in the world and consists of about 96,000 kms of NHs, which constitute only 2 per cent of the road network but carry about 40 per cent of the total road traffic.