NHAI's new plantation mandate is an admission of failure — one it helped engineer

Counterview News 

The National Highways Authority of India on Tuesday announced that highway projects will no longer receive their Provisional Certificate of Completion (PCC) or Provisional Commercial Operation Date (PCOD) unless at least 80% of the right-of-way earmarked for plantation is covered and saplings show a 90% survival rate at inspection. Operations and maintenance payments across EPC, HAM and BOT-Annuity projects will also be withheld if survival drops below 90%.

On paper, it is a green milestone. In practice, it is a belated confession — and the record on the ground suggests the targets the Authority now calls "mandatory" have been routinely violated for years, often by its own contractors and with its own acquiescence.

An Admission Buried In A Press Release

The most striking sentence in NHAI's own release is the quietest one: the Authority "had earlier observed that development of plantation along the Median and Avenues, which is a contractual obligation, was often not accorded due importance at the time of issuing PCC/PCOD." In other words, for years, completion certificates were handed out while plantation obligations — already legally binding under the Green Highways Policy, 2015 and IRC:SP:21-2009 — were ignored. The new guidelines simply put enforcement muscle behind rules that were supposed to be in force since 2015.

The Numbers Tell A Story Of Dying Greenery

The gap between promise and performance is stark:

- Transplantation has been close to a washout. A Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehradun assessment found that of 673 trees translocated by NHAI at NH-95 in 2019, no species survived past the first year. In East Singhbhum, only 10–12% of 1,000 transplanted trees survived, and a Jharkhand Forest Department report on NH-33 classified NHAI's transplant work as a straight-up "failure," noting that "none of the guidelines issued for transplanting have been followed." 

- Compensation planting lags far behind felling. On the Chandikhol–Paradip road-widening in Odisha, 3,500 trees were selected for translocation only after roughly 3,000 other large trees had already been cut.  In Coimbatore, NHAI had planted only 13,000 compensatory trees against a far larger number felled over a decade of road projects. 

- The national audit trail is damning. A 2026 CAG report on Maharashtra found only 47.37% of planned compensatory afforestation was achieved, with 2,593 hectares left unplanted due to faulty site selection.  In Uttarakhand, CAG found average plantation survival of 33.51% against the mandated 60–65%, with funds collected for 10 years of maintenance but spent on only three to five. 

Uprooted Twice: First By Bulldozers, Then By Neglect

The pattern of loss runs deeper than poor horticulture. In Jammu and Kashmir, NHAI and its contractors uprooted thousands of full-grown apple, plum, pear and peach trees for the Srinagar and Jammu ring roads — in one village, over 600 mature apple trees were axed while in bloom — with farmers paid compensation calculated at 1996 rates. 

Even where plantations were raised, they were often condemned from the start. Investigative reporting on the Green Highways Mission found that most highways begin as four-lane projects; trees planted within the right-of-way "are allowed to grow to a certain level but are chopped to expand the roads to be made six or eight lanes" — meaning the same land is effectively earmarked for trees and asphalt simultaneously. A corporate plantation partner, ITC, abandoned its green highways work after encroaching farmers destroyed saplings, saying it was NHAI's job to guarantee unencumbered land. 

By February 2022, even the National Green Tribunal had "rebuked NHAI for not adhering to the Green Highways Policy," with reports concluding the Authority had "consistently failed in tree plantations." 

Enforcement Is Welcome — If It Survives Contact With The Incentive Structure

There are signs NHAI is finally building verification capacity: its first National Highways Green Cover Index report, prepared with ISRO's National Remote Sensing Centre, has begun satellite-mapping green cover along roughly 30,000 km of highways across 24 states.  The new guidelines' provision for financial withholdings, expert field verification before O&M payments, and replacement of dead plants "with plants of similar age and growth" addresses real loopholes.

But the central contradiction remains unresolved. NHAI's incentives reward speed — kilometres opened, tolls commenced, annuities released. Contractors know that a PCC without plantation has historically cost nothing. Whether the new norms change outcomes depends entirely on whether the 80/90 thresholds are enforced at the same projects where traffic is already flowing — because that is precisely the stage at which, the Authority itself now admits, plantation was simply forgotten.

For the millions of trees already felled, transplanted to death, or planted only to be uprooted by the next widening cycle, the guidelines arrive a decade late.