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It seems to be a win-win situation for humans and animals. Both have welcomed new elevated stretches of highways on the Seoni Madhya Pradesh )-Nagpur (Maharashtra) sector of the national highway 44 passing through the Pench Tiger Reserve . While the road has made commute easier for humans, the five underpasses and four minor bridges on this 37-km stretch have also ensured that the movement of animals are not disrupted.The stretches through the forest built last year at a cost of Rs 240 crore also has a 750-m long underpass - believed to be the world’s longest highway underpass built exclusively for wild animals. Between March and December, camera traps have captured 5,450 images of tigers, leopards, wild dogs, chitals, Indian bisons, wild pigs, jungle cats and porcupines, among others, using the underpasses. Researches of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) are especially enthused that 11 tigers - five adult males, three adult females and three sub-adults - are frequent users of the new infrastructure. They have every right to be, given that WII was fighting since 2012 to ensure that the road construction does not disturb animal corridors in the reserve that straddles Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.In 2009, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) gave a contract to four-lane a 117-km road between Seoni and Nagpur for Rs 1,170 crore. But after animal activists protested and a court case threated to block the project, in 2015, NHAI agreed to embed an additional cost into the contract to account for the underpasses and bridges. By then, the project cost had shot up by Rs 240 crore. To protect the animals, NHAI also agreed to construct guide walls and nine underpasses of 50-750 m width at various places on the 37-km road.The highway going through Pench is part of a 117-km, four-lane expansion programme of the NH44 that was undertaken in 2010. Constructing the stretch through the forests took four years and was completed in 2019. The Pench sanctuary — a wildlife habitat that set the backdrop for Rudyard Kipling's fictional masterpiece, The Jungle Book — is spread across 741 sq.km in Maharashtra and 1,180 sq.km in Madhya Pradesh. It has about 100 tigers, says forest officer Ravi Kiran Govekar, and 40 of those are on the Maharashtra side of the forest. Ajay Songade, a resident of Dulara village in Maharashtra, says most of the 124 families in his village have come across tigers, though none has been attacked. “I saw one only a week ago, for the third time in my life. It was taking a nap on the village road,” he says.The villagers also talk about how a leopard was recently killed by a passing vehicle when it tried to cross the four-lane highway by avoiding the underpasses. Last year, a tiger was wounded while crossing the road this way. A road system that makes way for animals is still a new concept in India, says Bilal Habib, a scientist at WII headquarters in Dehradun. “Pench is the first such experiment in our country. We are yet to figure out the best model for an underpass — should we have one long underpass or several smaller ones?” he says. A 1.4-km underpass being built at a cost of Rs 140 crore in the MP section of the highway is set to become the world’s longest such animal-only underpass.Mitigation measures to avoid animal-human clash as a nation improves its infrastructure come with a steep cost. Take the case of a proposed 30-km state road between Mul and Chandrapur near Nagpur that passes through a protected forest. The estimated cost of the project is Rs 100 crore. But if the WII’s mitigation measures are accommodated, the authorities will need to cough up another Rs 400 crore. Naturally, the state government has been vehemently opposing the inflated cost due to the mitigation measures.In July, Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari had said in Parliament how difficult it would be for a poor country like India to spend so much of resources on structures for wildlife. He, however, clarified that he was in favour of tiger conservation.Last year, the Centre asked road building agencies to avoid expansion work along protected areas such as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. In exceptional cases, the design should factor in structures such as underpasses, fencing, monkey ladders and noise barriers. In Assam’s Lumding, for example, two elephant passes have been weaved into the design of a road project on NH 54. In highway constructions on the Haridwar-Dehradun sections, provisions have been made for three elephant underpasses, each six meters tall.The Centre’s directive to exclude road expansion in protected areas might not be a practical solution. Wildlife experts say that not widening stretches on a national highway will lead to the creation of traffic bottlenecks in forest areas, hampering mobility of animals. “Yes, we have to design the mitigation measures economically. After all, there are 20,000 km of roads in India that pass through protected habitats. Pench is just the beginning,” Habib adds.