New Delhi:

Union minister Nitin Gadkari, who has been handling the Road Transport portfolio for the third straight term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, today said efforts are on to use garbage to build roads, which will also take care of the mounting garbage problems of the country’s metro cities. 

“Delhi has four mountains of municipal garbage. Now, we have used 80 lakh tons of municipal garbage in road construction,” he told NDTV at the special Auto Conclave.

Giving cases in point, he named a number of highways in western and northern India — the Mumbai-Delhi Express highway, Ahmedabad-Vadodara highway, the Ahmedabad Dholera highway and also in roads in parts of Chandigarh, he added.

The project to convert stubble into biofuel is also going ahead full steam, he said. This will also take care of the massive pollution issue, especially the haze that chokes north India every winter.

“We have 400 projects in the process for which 60 have already started and they are making bio-CNG from parali,” he told NDTV. 

“And in Panipat, there is a project of IndianOil where they are making 1 lakh litres of bio-ethanol from rice stalks or parali, 150 tonnes of bio vitamins and 78,000 tons per year of aviation fuel,” he said, underscoring that it is a classic case of “waste to wealth” generation. 

This, he said, would also reduce reduce import bill and pollution and establishes an economic point of view of being “atmanirbhar” (self reliant).

The burning of parali, the minister said, has gone down by 40 per cent and will be down to zero per cent in the next two to three years. 

This, he added, will be because of two “important philosophies” he said — citing generation of wealth from waste as well as knowledge. “innovation, technology… are being used to convert knowledge into wealth,” he added.