As part of an ambitious plan to have a database of the country’s National Highways, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways will soon be using high-tech vehicles to collect crucial information like conditions of the roads, potholes, culverts, bridges, trees, topography, traffic condition and others.
Also, the Government has awarded the tender to a company to carry out the comprehensive road survey — held in 1989 manually the last time — for 3,000 kms of the National Highways. The Ministry wants to undertake similar exercises to cover rest of the 97,000 kms in the next three years to help maintain and create better road infrastructure.
“We are in the process of creating a road asset management system. At the moment, we lack a good database of our highways, which makes it very difficult to plan further roads,” said a senior official from MoRTH.
“The survey will give detailed feedback on condition of roads, potholes, culverts, flanking trees, and upkeep. It will also give us details like climatic conditions, road traffic situation, vegetation, road width, shoulders, land
use, construction material used etc,” he said.
The official said such handy data is the need of the hour, when the Ministry is aiming at expanding the road network by at least 20-25 per cent in the next five years.
The Ministry has outsourced the job to a consultant that has developed software to carry out the survey. The software — fitted on a vehicle — is complete with, GPS, cameras, profilometres, advanced lasers and weather sensors to record every little detail on the road.
“This vehicle will collect data and other details for the new programme named road measurement and data acquisition system (RODMAS).This will make prediction of road construction much easier for us. We need to have a sustainable road data collection system,” said the official.
“The initial data will be collected from 3,000 kms Highways running across the States, including Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu,” he said.
According to sources in the Ministry, the Government had started this exercise of creating a road asset database several years ago but it fell flat as all the work had to be done manually. There was little scope for updating as the National Highways Authority of India has limited manpower and resources.
“Once the Government has a database in place, which should take about three years to complete, we will update the more frequented stretches six monthly and little-used Highways annually,” he said.
Earlier this year, the NHAI had also tendered out the survey for bridges across India, which will be made part of this database.