Beyond the Green Façade

For a developing nation like ours, roads are not merely a means of transportation—they are lifelines of economic activity.

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"The use of the Harit Path mobile app for geo-tagging and real-time monitoring of saplings has added a welcome layer of transparency and accountability, ensuring that plantation efforts are not merely ceremonial but sustained and managed."

By facilitating the seamless movement of goods and people, roads serve as silent enablers of growth, inclusion, and opportunity. Yet, India’s roads remain a paradox of progress. On the one hand, they embody the country’s infrastructure ambitions—highways built at a record pace, expressways reducing travel time, and national corridors strengthening trade and connectivity. On the other, they expose glaring gaps in planning, implementation, and sustainability: pothole-ridden stretches, rising accident rates, unrelenting congestion, and widespread ecological disruption.

Now, with climate consciousness becoming a nonnegotiable part of development discourse, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is repositioning itself. The focus is no longer solely on how many kilometres are built per day, but on how green, inclusive, and future-proof those kilometres can be. It was with this vision that the Green Highways (Plantation, Transplantation, Beautification & Maintenance) Policy was launched in 2015.