NHAI Announces Green Highways Excellence Awards 2026 Winners

The National Highways Authority of India announced the winners of the Green Highways Excellence Awards 2026 on 3 September 2026. The awards reward the best landscaping and plantation management practices along National Highways. NHAI set them up in 2025, as required by the Green Highways Policy of 2015.

The three categories

• Avenue Plantations along the edge of the highway.
• Median Plantations in the strip between carriageways.
• Plantation in Land Parcels, which takes in clover leaves, interchanges, toll plazas and service areas.

Who won the first prizes

In Avenue Plantations the first prize went to the six-laning of the Chilakaluripet Bypass on NH 16 in Andhra Pradesh, under the Vijayawada regional office. In Median Plantations the first prize went to the four-laning of the Hyderabad-Yadgiri section of NH 163, under the Hyderabad regional office. In Plantation in Land Parcels the first prize went to the Jamtha Clover Leaf and Oxygen Bird Park on NH 44, under the Nagpur regional office. The eight-lane Vadodara-Kim Expressway in Gujarat, part of the Vadodara-Mumbai Expressway, took second prize in two of the three categories. A Miyawaki plantation at the Lucknow-Ayodhya Road and Lucknow Outer Ring Road junction took third prize in the land parcels category.

How the entries were judged

Nominations came in through the NHAI online portal. Field offices, concessionaires, contractors, government agencies, non-government organisations and private agencies working on highway plantation projects could all apply. Each entry had to carry geo-tagged photographs, drone videos, site-specific plantation plans and data on how many saplings survived. The survival rate of plantations carried the highest weight in the assessment. Other parameters were the plantation action plan for the site, the timing of plantation work, the size of pits, the quality of planting material, protective measures, work done as per approved design, the diversity of species and the use of native species. Quality, sustainability, effectiveness and the scope for copying a practice elsewhere on the network were given special weight.