Linear developments in road and rail transportation sectors have profound influence on wildlife values, habitats, and landscape features. These influences are often disproportionate to the area of land that they traverse. Transportation infrastructure can undermine ecological processes through the fragmentation of wildlife populations, restriction of wildlife movements and thereby disruption of gene flows. Building an understanding of what solutions may be more effective in maintaining landscape permeability and avoiding mortality of animals in transportation corridors can help better planning of roads and railway projects in sensitive areas.

In order to build capacity of transportation engineers and planners in the field of transportation ecology, a training course was organized by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in association with National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) on “Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Road and Rail Transportation Projects for Promoting Smart Green Infrastructure” from 17 – 19 February, 2016. This course was also attended by the officials of the Indian Railways. While lauding the success of this course in achieving the objective of sensitising transportation engineers in road and rail sectors for the need to mainstream biodiversity in their development initiatives, the Executive Director of Environment and Housekeeping Management from Indian Railway requested WII to develop an exclusive training module for sensitizing the railway officials to harmonise developments in railway sector with biodiversity conservation.

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