Under the Green Highways Project, the government has made it mandatory to set aside 1 per cent of the total project cost of any NH contract to a Green Fund corpus that will be used for plantation purposes.

Union Minister of Road Transport & Highways and Shipping Shri Nitin Gadkari launched the initial plantation drive on 1,500 km of National Highways at a cost of about Rs 300 crore under the National Green Highways Mission in New Delhi today.

Speaking on the occasion Shri Gadkari said that the greening project has a huge potential to generate jobs and can prove to be a game-changer for agriculture and rural economy.

Greening of one km of highway provides employment to ten people. Today's launch of  1,500 km under the Mission will employ 15,000 people . The Minister further said that the project may even be linked with the NREGA scheme.

The afforestation is expected to help in sequestering approximately 12 lakh mt carbon annually.

It will help in making India pollution free. It will also help in curtailing the number of road accidents in India.

National Green Highways Mission Mobile App was also launched on the occasion. The mobile application will enable the management to monitor all the projects with real time data from the fields.  The technology will assist in identifying the bottlenecks quickly and ensure speedy and successful implementations of the projects.