Why Tamil Nadu needs a bee corridor

Tamil Nadu’s food system relies a lot on a workforce that rarely gets noticed. Bees. The primary pollinators of crops such as mango, coconut, sunflower and cotton, without them yields could reduce by 40%, or in some cases, 90%. Yet across the state, from Kanyakumari, the honey capital of India, to the Nilgiris, these pollinators are losing the habitats they need to survive. According to the Union ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI), the ecosystem services contributed by bees is about 10% of crop output, highlighting its economic value. India needs 150 million colonies to meet its 50 million hectares of bee dependent crops. At present, only 1.2 million colonies exist.

This tiny miracle is being affected by human driven changes of land fragmentation, pollution and chemical intensive landscapes. Research evidence from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University shows the shifting of bees, especially Apis cerana indica, from flowers to sugary discarded food often seen in urban dump yards, indicating critical floral scarcity. Bees are not just agricultural inputs but essential to the city’s metabolism just like a water drainage or a bus route.

Imagine an uninterrupted flowering landscape, a green highway of sorts, without any dead zones of concrete and pollution barriers, where bees can move, feed, shelter and breed. A functionally built bee corridor across roadside strips, urban parks, green roofs and utility areas ensures year-round foraging and steady supply of nectar. This is not a new initiative; many cities have done this – all without new land.

Oslo created the world’s first bee passage in 2015, to help pollinators navigate the city safely by creating a continuous corridor of food and shelter, with resting spots in the form of rooftop gardens and at cemeteries. Utrecht’s ‘bee stops’ feature miniature gardens on 310 bus shelters that attract bees and butterflies and improve air quality and cool the urban environment. Melbourne and Singapore have created pollinator-friendly park networks. To initiate an urban bee corridor, TN doesn’t need to start from scratch. It has a blueprint on urban environmental management. All it needs to do is add a lens of ‘bee’.

Tamil Nadu’s Urban Greening Policy 2026 mandates urban local bodies maintain a minimum of 15% green cover. The Wetlands Mission points to potential blue-green landscapes, while City Biodiversity Indexing identifies ecosystem service gaps. Partnerships between Greater Chennai Corporation and forest department have initiated tree-planting drives and dumpyard transformation projects. Adding to this momentum, the 2026 Bee Corridor Initiative by the National Highways Authority of India is transforming highway strips into pollinator-friendly green pathways. This is a genuinely forward-looking initiative for TN and signals an effort to align urban greening with pollinator conservation. But here lies the inconvenient arithmetic. Bee corridors need water to sustain continuous nectar sources. Creating bee corridors in water-stressed cities, where irrigation is not integrated into green networks, risks becoming another ‘green illusion’.

The solution is at hand — greywater. About 60%-80% of household wastewater is greywater, and policies already support its reuse. The Combined Development and Building Rules mandate greywater recycling in new multi-storey buildings. The Sustainable Water Security Mission (SuWaSeM) targets 30% domestic wastewater reuse, and the 2019 Wastewater Reuse Policy recommends its use for public greening.

The challenge and opportunity lie in the convergence of multiple programmes and departments with one sustainable mission. Urban bee corridors are not merely aesthetic planting projects but an overlay of policy, infrastructure and governance. This calls for a state-level urban greening coordination committee under the urban greening policy, with a dedicated pollinator corridor subcommittee to design and monitor implementation, while SuWaSeM ensures greywater irrigation. In short, “No planting without plumbing; no green without grey”.

At the city level, both what we plant and how we water it must be standardised. Programmes ranging from the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and smart cities to the state’s own greening initiatives should align with these design guidelines.

The grey water supported bee corridor makes a sustainable asset as it accelerates circular economy, agriculture and livelihood. Aligning green – blue – grey development broadens SDGs to sustainable water cycle and cities. Tamil Nadu is always a front-runner for innovative policies. This time, the state has everything, just needs a connection-shared responsibility. A city that can support its bees, in the long term can create a healthy food system, a secured water cycle, diversified ecosystem and a liveable city.

(The writer is a research associate with the Sustainable Development Goals Coordination Centre of UNDP, Tamil Nadu)