Highway Genebank: An Ideation for Plant Genetic Resources Conservation on the Highway Margins

India is an ecologically and culturally diverse country. Every region of this country has a plethora of woody perennials that have the potential to provide food, fibre, fodder, fuel, nutrition, and livelihood to the local population. Promoting access to this wide diversity of multipurpose trees can extensively address the problem of malnutrition and poverty in rural India. Therefore, these valuable biological resources should be conserved for posterity and promoted vigorously to make them accessible to the common citizen. Conservation of these valuable genetic resources and their germplasm in field genebanks is a common practice followed across the globe. But, every country including India faces severe constraint of land resources to upscale such efforts leading to assemblage of proportionately very less number of germplasm in the field genebanks. A massive highway development programme of nearly 69432 km length is being undertaken in India. These highway projects are being planted with tree species to make them green. With an appropriate policy convergence and coordination with various plantation and livelihood schemes, such plantations can conserve thousands of genetically diverse accessions available in the woody perennial while dispensing other benefits that had been stipulated in the plantation programme of the country. A conservative estimate projects that the express highways alone an accommodate nearly 20 million trees. Additionally, such plantations can serve as a platform for advancement of research on woody perennials for students, academicians, social scientists, conservationists etc.