Green rural roads go past 20,000-km mark

NEW DELHI: The rural development ministry has built over 20,000 kms of roads using environment-friendly measures in the last four years as part of government’s rural road development scheme, officials familiar with the matter said.

The Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) is a nationwide plan to provide road connectivity to unconnected villages. Under the initiative, 5,62,047 km of new and improved rural road network has been created, according to official data.

“For the last few years, our focus to use green and environment-friendly technologies has been yielding better results. We have completed 20,733 Km of roads using green methods,” said rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha.

The rural development ministry’s performance attracted praise from Union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari, who enquired last week how it managed to achieve the feat, which his own ministry had not succeeded in attaining, officials familiar with the development said.

An advocate of using environment-friendly measures to constructs roads, Gadkari had last week in Nagpur asked road developers of Maharashtra to use a mixture of 30% glass, rubber and plastic waste for road construction.

Using shredded plastic remains the most common technique in building greener roads, the rural development ministry’s internal communication showed. So far, waste plastic has been used in building 9,600 kms of road followed by cold mix, a bitumen-based formula, (6041 kms). “Some of the most used techniques to [build green roads] are cold mix technology, waste plastic technology, fly ash, steel slag, coir and jute geo textile, cell filled concrete and panel concrete,” said rural ministry official Alka Upadhyay,who anchors the PMSGY.

(With inputs from Anisha Dutta)