Nitin Saxena v. NHAI (2026): NGT permits felling of 7,871 trees for a Bhopal bypass on strict afforestation conditions

When a public-interest applicant asks a green court to stop a national highway from cutting down nearly ten thousand trees, the Tribunal is rarely choosing between trees and tarmac in the abstract. It is testing whether the executive's decision to fell was taken lawfully, whether the harm was minimised, and whether the loss is being compensated on terms it can hold the authority to. In Nitin Saxena v. National Highway Authority of India, the National Green Tribunal's Principal Bench did exactly that — and, having satisfied itself on each count, allowed the felling while wrapping it in a fifteen-year compliance regime.

The facts in brief

The applicant, a Bhopal resident, challenged the National Highways Authority of India's (NHAI) proposal to cut and fell a large number of trees for the Asharam Tiraha to Ratnagiri Tiraha "Ayodhya Bypass" project — a roughly 16-km road-widening corridor running from Asharam Tiraha on Karond Road to the Ratnagiri Tiraha, Ayodhya by-pass, within the city of Bhopal. (Despite the name, the "Ayodhya Bypass" is a road in Bhopal, not in the town of Ayodhya.) The applicant prayed that the project be cancelled or rerouted to avoid unnecessary felling, and sought large-scale plantation of native species and a compensatory-afforestation regime in the area.

NHAI's case was that the project answered a real and growing congestion problem in a high-influx urban corridor; that the alignment, alternate routes, road design and traffic load had been studied at the pre-feasibility, EIA and DPR stages; and that the felling proposal had been re-examined and approved by a High Level Centrally Empowered Committee constituted by the State of Madhya Pradesh and comprising senior forest officials and environmental experts. Significantly, the Tribunal noted that the project length was under 100 km and that, in terms of the MoEF&CC notification dated 14 July 2022, it stood exempted from the requirement of environmental clearance.

The single most consequential factual development was that the number of affected trees had, after design changes, been reduced from 9,888 to 7,871 — a reduction NHAI offered as evidence that it had genuinely sought to minimise the ecological footprint.

The question

The Tribunal framed the dispute narrowly. The "main question," it recorded, was the lawfulness of NHAI's proposal to fell trees for the bypass — not whether a city should build roads, but whether this felling, sanctioned by this committee, on these terms, was open to interference. That recast the matter as one of legality and adequacy of safeguards rather than a merits review of the road itself: had the felling permission been granted by a competent authority, was the harm minimised, and was the compensation sufficient and enforceable?

What the Tribunal held

The Tribunal accepted that the decision to construct and widen the 16-km corridor was an administrative one taken in the public interest, "and it cannot be challenged unless and until it violates any provisions of the law or constitutional mandates." Finding no such violation, it held that the felling permission — taken by the competent authority and approved by the Centrally Empowered Committee — disclosed no illegality. It expressly invoked the settled principle that development and environment must be reconciled rather than traded off:

On that footing the Tribunal accepted the Centrally Empowered Committee's report, recommended that its directions "be strictly observed," and issued a structured set of conditions. The compensatory regime requires plantation of trees at ten times the number felled — a 10:1 ratio — with priority to Mahua, Neem and other native species and the elimination of certain unsuitable species. The work of compensatory plantation is to be monitored for fifteen years by a technical committee drawn from the Forest Department, the Municipal Corporation, the Horticulture Department and the State Pollution Control Board, with periodic review. The Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board is to carry out regular air-quality monitoring, and the respondents must comply with the Madhya Pradesh Vrakshon Ka Parirakshan (Nagriya Kshetra) Adhiniyam, 2001, the green-highway/plantation policy of 2015, and CAMPA fund obligations. Where felling for any development project exceeds the threshold prescribed in the State notification, the matter must be referred to the High Level Centrally Empowered Committee.

With these observations, the Original Application No. 53/2026-PB, with its pending interlocutory applications, was disposed of.

Analysis

The order is a clean illustration of how the Tribunal has come to handle infrastructure felling: not by asking whether a road should exist, but by policing the process and the price. Three features stand out.

First, the reduction from 9,888 to 7,871 trees did real work. It allowed NHAI to show that minimisation had occurred and gave the Tribunal a concrete reason to treat the proposal as a considered one rather than an indiscriminate clearance — a practical echo of the proportionality reasoning that runs through Indian environmental jurisprudence on clearances.

Second, the Tribunal leaned heavily on institutional vetting. The repeated emphasis that the High Level Centrally Empowered Committee — staffed by forest officials and experts — had examined and re-examined the felling allowed the Tribunal to defer to a specialist body rather than substitute its own judgment, while still attaching its own conditions. This is deference structured by safeguards, not abdication.

Third, the enforceability mechanics are the heart of the order. A 10:1 ratio is meaningless without survival, and the Tribunal plainly knew it: hence the fifteen-year monitoring period, the multi-agency technical committee, native-species mandates, and the pointed directions requiring NHAI and the State PCB to report, within three months, on funds deposited and utilised for plantation and re-afforestation over the last five years, "with survival of the trees year-wise." The order's scepticism about whether past compensatory funds actually produced surviving trees is its most candid passage — and its most useful, because it converts a paper ratio into an auditable obligation.

The reliance on the EC exemption for sub-100-km projects under the 14 July 2022 notification is also worth flagging. It meant the felling was tested against State tree-protection law and committee scrutiny rather than the central EC process — a reminder that for a large class of urban road projects, the substantive environmental gatekeeping now sits with State committees and tree authorities, with the NGT as the backstop.

Why it matters

For practitioners, the order is a template for what a felling challenge realistically yields when the executive has done its homework: not cancellation, but conditions. The litigable space is in the conditions themselves — the afforestation ratio, the species, the monitoring tenure, the audit of past fund utilisation. For project authorities, the message is that minimisation and a credible, auditable compensation plan are now effectively preconditions to a clean disposal. And for the wider debate on urban green cover, Nitin Saxena underscores that the legal protection of trees in Indian cities increasingly turns less on stopping felling than on whether compensatory planting genuinely replaces what is lost — a question the Tribunal here, refreshingly, refused to take on trust.

Related on Valkya

• The NGT in 2026: urban waterbodies, infrastructure encroachment, and the developing operational framework
• T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad v. Union of India: the dictionary meaning of 'forest' and the continuing mandamus
• Lafarge Umiam Mining v. Union of India: environmental clearance, proportionality and the National Regulator direction
• A.P. Pollution Control Board v. M.V. Nayudu (1999): the precautionary principle and the reversed burden of proof

Sources

• National Green Tribunal allows Ayodhya Bypass expansion project in Bhopal with strict environmental safeguards — LiveLaw
• Order in O.A. No. 53/2026-PB, Nitin Saxena v. NHAI & Ors. (NGT, 20 May 2026) — PDF via LiveLaw