The plan aims to reduce the use of soil from agricultural land for building embankments for highways, as well as provide a viable outlet for millions of tonnes of solid waste from landfills.

An embankment requires earthen material that is placed and compacted for the purpose of raising a roadway above the level of the existing surrounding ground surface. This normally uses soil from private land closest to a highway. According to officials privy to the plan, under the new policy guidelines, public sector highway building agencies such as the National Highway Authority of India as well as private sector entities would be mandated to use processed inorganic solid waste—inert material or soil generated from processing and bio-mining of solid waste—in building embankments for all upcoming and under construction highways and roads.

Building agencies would also be mandated to use the Gati Shakti portal to identify solid waste processing sites earmarked under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) 2.0 and enter into contracts with the municipalities closest to highway sites for supplies. The cost of this material would be built into the project cost which would be 10% less than the cost of soil sourced from private land.

The official quoted above said that draft policy guidelines on use of urban solid waste have already been issued and the roads ministry proposes to finalize the policy for implementation by the end of the month.

Queries sent to the ministry remained unanswered at press time. The disposal of solid waste generated on a daily basis has become a major environmental challenge in urban areas. As per the government’s assessment, around 10,000 hectares of land is locked in dump sites. Due to limited land availability, these landfill sites are on the verge of exceeding capacity, posing serious environmental and health hazards.

The initiative is aimed at providing a viable economic alternative for use of solid waste and lessen the pressure on municipalises to look for more land to dump waste.

The new initiative is based on an exercise undertaken through the NHAI under which two pilot projects for utilization of inert material which is one of the major components of municipal solid waste, were undertaken.

The first pilot project was carried out in Delhi-NCR on parts of the Delhi-Mumbai expressway and the second on the Ahmedabad-Dholera expressway in Gujarat. In both the cases, construction of embankment was successfully carried with strict quality control using the inert material.

Under the Swachh Bharat Mission Urban 2.0 (SBM2.0), funds are provided to local bodies to take up processing of urban solid waste. As per an official assessment, about 170 million tonnes of waste is accumulated across 2,304 dump sites in the country.