Get ready to drive on ?green? highways. The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is preparing a strategy to construct environment-friendly highways to reduce its carbon footprint.
The idea is to use recycled material for building roads, reduce energy consumption and utilise the sides of highways for water harvesting and growing plants. The authority also wants to explore carbon reduction revenue streams, or carbon credit, and develop a system to rate all national highways on their environment friendliness. India has a national highway network of 70,000 km.
The idea has taken shape after three years of consultation with the World Bank and various communications?written and oral?with the environment ministry. India has committed to effect a 20-25% reduction in its overall carbon intensity by 2020. The government has put in place norms for ensuring low carbon emission in buildings. However, no such guidelines have been formed for highways.
?We started the negotiations with the World Bank in 2007. We don?t want to build only the regular roads with the World Bank money. Their money should be utilised for something that we don?t usually do and, moreover, building green highways is the need of the day,? NHAI chairman Brijeshwar Singh told FE.
Last year, the World Bank committed to give an assistance of $2.97 billion for building roads and highways in India.
The country has also demanded an additional loan of $2 billion to finance viability-gap funding and annuity projects.
NHAI has invited expression of interest for appointing a consultant to prepare a detailed project report for upgrading a 55-km stretch of NH-1 in Haryana into a green facility. The consultant for this pilot project has to suggest ways and means to preserve the environment while building pedestrian facilities, shoulder sealing and grade separation.
NHAI also wants to take measures to reduce traffic noise, conserve and harvest water, reduce dust, use energy efficient lighting for toll plaza and street lights, and improve air quality. The authority expects to award the civil work for the project by June 2011.
?We also want to use construction materials that don?t have a big carbon footprint. We are already using materials like flyash on some of the stretches. The idea is to reduce the overall carbon footprint,? Singh said.
On financing ?green? highways Singh said, ?The intention is to utilise savings out of money taken from the World Bank. We may go to the World Bank at a later stage to fund such projects?.
For the pilot project in Haryana, NHAI wants to use a part of a $620 million loan received from International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, an organ of the World Bank Group. The loan was originally given for the Lucknow-Muzaffarpur national highway.