Bengaluru: As part of an initiative to go green, the state government has decided to earmark 1% of civil cost of all roads, including state highways, district and rural roads, constructed or developed by its agencies for roadside plantations.

As per official sources pooling of the funds for this initiative will begin from the start of the financial year 2017-18 and the same will exclusively used for planting saplings along roadside to provide a ‘green cover’ to the vast road network criss-crossing the state.

The Union Ministry of Surface Transport too has adopted a similar policy but it is limited to national highway development projects.

While earlier the state government had decided to earmark 1% of the civil cost of only state highway development projects for the purpose, a notification issued by Forest, Environment & Ecology Department and gazetted on?February 23, 2017 requires that the funds for the corpus be pooled not just from state highways projects but also those taken up by road development agencies and zilla, taluk and gram panchayats.

The Public Works Department, Karnataka Road Development Corporation and Karnataka Rural?Road Development Agency are among the agencies that are required to pool the funds to plant saplings.

If the budgetary allocation for road projects for the year 2017-18 continues to remain the same as the previous year, nearly Rs 80 crore will be available for the green cover initiative which will be used for planting saplings, laying grass turfs and ornamental shrubs along existing roads and new routes. Different saplings will be planted along different routes depending on availability, soil suitability and climate, said sources.