RURAL ROAD NETWORK PLANNING : A PHOTOGRAMMETRIC APPROACH

Abstract

The construction of an adequate rural road network has become a matter of national concern in India. It is seen as an essential infrastructure to promote the development of some three quarters of the population of the country.. Until now, only about 44 percent of the villages are connected With all weather roads. The remaining villages require about 1.3 million kilometers of rural roads involving an expenditure of Rs. 4,12,852 millions at the current price level. CRRI, New Delhi has developed a Rural Road Network Planning Model (RRNP) for comprehensive planning of rural roads. This approach uses topographical maps for extraction of data. These maps are revised after long intervals of time therefore it provides out dated information. Any Optimum network obtained by this outdated data will lag behind the time. More over, in this model the method of defining the connectivity of one village with another have some limitations. In this work a new concept of Dummy nodes has been introduced to improve the method of defining the connectivity. Aerial photographs at 1:25,000 approx. available in the RSPE section were used to show the application of photogrammetry in providing the input information to CRRI model. The mapping was done on WILD A-8 machine. The results clearly show the advantage of using data from aerial photographs in combination with dummy node concept, which has led to a saving of the order of fMrty five percent.