Road development enfolds activities such as Planning, Construction, Management and Maintenance of a road network. Technology of road construction, maintenance and operations in advanced countries, with emphasis on automation, is copied in developing world, rather unmindful of its intemperateness. This is inevitable in some sense, the world having come far closer today, than ever before and coalesced into the metaphorical global village. However, for a country such as India, the technology of road construction and maintenance, as is employed in the developed countries, needs to be modulated to its peculiar problems of scarcity of capital and abundance of labour and its predominantly rural setting. At one end of the spectrum of road development is the construction of high traffic density corridors in the form of multi lane national highways and expressways connecting the metros in the country. This is perhaps the sector more amenable for the adoption of the technology that embodies mechanization, automation and high-end specifications. However, the categories of roads connecting smaller towns and bringing together the population that resides in the villages that lie scattered all over the country is a segment that needs to be treated differently. Development of these roads is more suitably done using what can be aptly termed intermediate or appropriate technology. In a lighter vein this is the adoption of the middle path so vehemently propounded by the Buddhist philosophy. The article deals with the various facets of such intermediate technology along with a few case studies. Successful execution of road construction in the rural areas in Maharashtra, under the Employment Guarantee Scheme combining labour intensive methods with mechanization, provides a perfect example of sustainable road development. Submersible-bridge structures permitting interruption to traffic only for a small duration in the flood seasons is another example of cost effective and functionally satisfactory solution on relatively unimportant roads. The article proposes to bring out such cases of application of the appropriate or intermediate technology in the state of Maharashtra, considered as a progressive state in India. All these case studies strongly suggest the adoption of the middle path towards a sustainable road development. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Samenvatting