NHAI Lists Rs 19,700 Crore of Wildlife Mitigation Work

The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has brought out a document titled 'Wildlife Mitigation Measures & Structures', setting out how wildlife protection is being written into the planning, design and building of National Highways. The release marks National Wildlife Week, observed from 2 to 8 October 2026. The document was released by Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari at a Chintan Shivir held at Ekta Nagar in Gujarat.

What has been spent

Across the past five years about Rs 19,700 crore has gone into wildlife mitigation infrastructure and allied environmental safeguards on National Highway projects. The money is meant to tackle three problems that highway building creates for animals: habitats cut into fragments, roads acting as barriers to movement, and collisions between wildlife and vehicles. Mitigation is not applied uniformly; what goes into a stretch depends on how ecologically sensitive the corridor is, how animals actually move through it, and what the engineering allows.

More than 2,150 structures

The document counts more than 2,150 wildlife mitigation structures either already built or proposed along National Highways in the country. These include animal underpasses, crossings integrated into major and minor bridges, culverts reshaped so animals can use them, canopy crossings for tree-dwelling species and other specialised designs. The spending breaks up as shown below.

Measures that are not structures

Alongside concrete and steel, the framework uses signage, fencing and speed regulation. Guide fencing and noise barriers have been put up along more than 300 km of National Highway alignments so that animals are steered towards the crossings built for them and conflict with vehicles falls. Noise barriers, reptile crossings and rainwater harvesting are among the other interventions listed.

Monitoring and the road ahead

NHAI has set up monitoring arrangements that include camera trapping, used to study how animals move and to review periodically whether the measures are working. Spots where wildlife and vehicles collide most often are identified as hotspots and fitted with speed-regulation boards and signage. The document also presses for closer work between conservation bodies and the agencies that build highways, so that mitigation enters at every stage of a project rather than being added later. It is placed on the NHAI website as a reference framework, and it is intended to document the full range of measures now in use so that connectivity and biodiversity can advance together.