Technology and Green Highways — Enjoy the journey!
Road trips in the monsoons have their own charm and what makes them even more special is driving past lush green fields along the highways. As they say “the journey is more beautiful than the destination”. Rightly said!
Trees play a major role in controlling climate change apart from playing their role in soil and water conservation. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways launched the Green Highways (Plantation, Transplantation, Beautification & Maintenance) Policy in 2015. The Ministry aims at keeping aside 1% of the total project cost of all highways projects for plantation and maintenance of trees along highways. That would mean that around INR 1000 crore per year would be available for plantations. The policy not only looks at plantation and maintenance but also looks at keeping a track of the trees being planted through timely audits.
Technology such as satellite imaging, geotagging, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning along with Big Data Analytics has a significant part to play here.
Let’s look at the example of what The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) is doing in terms of keeping a track of the trees planted along highways.
Sometime in 2020, they launched the Harit Path GPS based mobile app, that captures details such as location, growth, species, maintenance activities performed, targets and achievements of all plants under such projects. Once every three months photos and data captured using this app is transferred to NHAI’s AI platform — Data Lake.
Geotagging comes into pay here, with each tree being tagged. So, what is Geotagging?
Geotagging is the process by which geographical information such as latitude, longitude etc. gets added to an image or video or any such media. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning systems can use the quantum of data generated by these systems to give meaningful inferences that would help to keep a track of the current plantation. Not only this, historical data and prediction models could possibly suggest sites and areas for future plantations depending on the soil and weather conditions in a geographical area.
Technology is and can in the future be a big contributor to maintain the ecological balance. In recent years blockchain technology has also came into use for tracking plantations and taking the necessary corrective actions.
Recently, NASA used AI to map non forest trees using deep learning algorithms and high-resolution satellite imagery. AI is thus empowering researchers, Governments and environmentalists with data to take the necessary actions to preserve and maintain the ecological balance.
What are your thoughts on this? Please share in the comments.
