PIB TrackerIndia's answer to imported bitumen has been laid over 100 metres
A backgrounder on green highways reports 3.61 crore saplings, a satellite green-cover index covering a fifth of the network, and a rice-straw road surface proven on one trial stretch.
What happened
- More than 3.61 crore saplings planted across about 1.32 lakh km of National Highways over five years, as of July 2026.
- The first National Highways Green Cover Index report, with ISRO's NRSC, covers nearly 30,000 km across 24 states, before and after the monsoon.
- NHAI September 2026 guidelines: 80% of earmarked Right of Way planted and 90% survival required for provisional completion certification.
- Bio-bitumen from rice-straw pyrolysis, developed by CSIR-CRRI and CSIR-IIP, transferred January 2026 and laid on a 100-metre stretch of NH-40 in Meghalaya.
- The NH network grew from 91,287 km (2014) to 1,46,572 km (March 2026) - nearly 61%.
For Prelims
- Green Highways Policy, 2015: its full name is the Plantation, Transplantation, Beautification and Maintenance policy. Stated aims include pollution and dust absorption, arresting embankment soil erosion, moderating wind and radiation, and local employment.
- Right of Way (RoW): the land legally required for building, operating and maintaining a highway. Plantation targets are set as a share of the RoW, not of road length - which is why 80% of available RoW is the compliance test.
- Bio-bitumen: bio-oil from pyrolysis of post-harvest rice straw, blended with conventional bitumen. The same pyrolysis yields gaseous fuel, bio-pesticide fractions and high-grade carbon - so it is a stubble-management route as much as a roads one.
- Bitumen: the hydrocarbon binder in road paving, called "black gold" in the pavement industry. India imports nearly 50% of its requirement.
- Miyawaki: the "pot plantation method" - trees and shrubs planted densely so growth can be up to ten times faster, suited to space-constrained sites.
- NH-GCI: the National Highways Green Cover Index, prepared with the National Remote Sensing Centre of ISRO - satellite assessment replacing field visits as the primary monitoring method.
- The recycled material list: fly ash and pond ash from thermal plants, Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement, construction and demolition waste, plastic waste, slag and crumb rubber.
- Trees for Bees: pollinator corridors along stretches of the Delhi-Amritsar-Katra Expressway, using flowering and locally suitable species - highway verge as habitat rather than landscaping.
For UPSC: Green highways sit at the junction of three separate questions - infrastructure, air quality and agricultural residue - and this backgrounder gives you all three with numbers. Use bio-bitumen on stubble burning and the circular economy, the Green Cover Index on remote sensing in governance, and the NHAI survival and Right of Way conditions as an example of an environmental obligation written into a payment milestone.
What it is NOT: The 3.61 crore figure counts saplings planted, not surviving, and no survival number is given for it anywhere - even though a 90 per cent survival benchmark exists for new projects. The Green Cover Index findings are described as revealing "significant variation" with no rankings, no states named and no baseline value published. The bio-bitumen section gives no cost, no volume, no blend ratio and no timeline for adoption into national standards. No figure is given for how much fly ash, plastic waste or reclaimed asphalt is actually used, in tonnes or as a share of material consumed. And there is no carbon or air-quality measurement anywhere in a document about green highways - the benefits are stated as mechanisms, never as quantities.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.14 · GS3.9 · Linkage L2
Anchor
India imports nearly half the bitumen it needs to pave its roads. CSIR-CRRI and CSIR-IIP have developed a domestic substitute from the pyrolysis of rice straw, transferred the technology in January 2026, and laid it on a trial stretch of the Jorabat-Shillong Expressway. The stretch is 100 metres long. The same passage describes India as the first country to scale bio-bitumen to industrial and commercial levels.
Substantiation (data)
The plantation programme is real and now measurable. More than 3.61 crore saplings have gone in across about 1.32 lakh km of National Highways in five years - roughly 274 a kilometre - on a network that itself grew 61 per cent, from 91,287 km in 2014 to 1,46,572 km by March 2026. NHAI's September 2026 guidelines withhold provisional completion certification unless 80 per cent of the earmarked Right of Way is planted and 90 per cent of saplings survive at inspection, and the same benchmark applies through Operations and Maintenance.
Position
Tying plantation to the completion certificate is the single most consequential thing in this document, and it is buried. A contractor who cannot get provisional completion certified without 80 per cent Right of Way coverage and 90 per cent sapling survival has a financial reason to keep trees alive, which no amount of policy exhortation ever produced. The Green Cover Index with ISRO's remote sensing centre supplies the verification that makes the condition enforceable rather than self-reported.
Counterpoint
Coverage is still thin where it counts. The Green Cover Index assesses nearly 30,000 km across 24 states - about a fifth of the network - and the 3.61 crore saplings are reported as planted, with no survival figure attached to them at all, even though the new rules set a 90 per cent survival standard for future work. The index is described as revealing significant variation without naming a single state or publishing a single value.
Problematisation
Bio-bitumen is the part of this that could actually matter, and it is the part with the least behind it. Halving a bitumen import bill and giving post-harvest rice straw a buyer would address two national problems with one process. But a hundred metres is a demonstration, not a supply chain: nothing is said about cost per tonne, blend ratio, straw collection logistics, or when it enters highway construction standards. Claiming first-in-the-world industrial scale on that evidence weakens a genuinely promising result.
Conclusion
The enforcement architecture here is better than the materials story. Watch two things: whether the Green Cover Index expands past a fifth of the network and starts publishing rankings, and whether bio-bitumen moves from a trial stretch into the specification manual. Until then, 3.61 crore saplings is a planting statistic, not a green cover one.
Deploys into: Circular economy in infrastructure materials · Stubble burning and agricultural residue valorisation · Remote sensing as a compliance instrument · Environmental conditions in construction contracts
PIB Backgrounder (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways) · 2026-09-28 · PRID 2316139 · PIB source ↗