NRIDA Wins U.P. Medal 2025 for Steel Slag Rural Roads

The National Rural Infrastructure Development Agency (NRIDA), which works under the Ministry of Rural Development, has been picked for the U.P. Medal for Innovative Technology in Roads for the year 2025. The honour comes from the Indian Roads Congress, and it recognises the agency's push to use steel slag, a by-product of steel making, in village road construction under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY).

When and where the medal will be given

The medal will be handed over on 19 November 2026 at the annual function of the 85th Annual Session of the Indian Roads Congress, which is being held at Hyderabad in Telangana.

The project behind the award

The nomination sent by the Ministry and the agency rested on road works taken up in Jharkhand under PMGSY-III, sanctioned in the year 2022-23. Steel slag was used there in place of conventional aggregate.

Besides the saving on materials, the closeness of industrial steel plants to the work sites trimmed the cost of carrying the slag, which added to the gain.

Why steel slag matters

Steel slag is industrial waste. Putting it into road layers turns a disposal problem into a building material, saves natural aggregate and lowers the cost per kilometre. For a programme as large as PMGSY, even a small saving per kilometre adds up across states. The approach fits the wider effort to use locally available, marginal and waste materials in road building.

The bigger picture

The Ministry of Rural Development and NRIDA have so far sanctioned 1,81,923 km of road works that use sustainable technologies. Of this, 1,39,901 km has already been completed. These figures show that new technologies in rural roads are no longer pilot projects but a settled part of the programme, and they give a sense of how green building methods are spreading across the countryside.