FACILITY BASED NETWORK PLANNING OF RURAL ROADS USING GIS

Abstract

A Large proportion (i.e., about 68%) of the population in India lives in rural areas. Transportation provides the basic infrastructure for overall development of the areas and it can be deemed to be the precursor of all forms of development activities. The task of providing an adequate rural road network to cater the needs of 0.6 million villages throughout the country is gigantic. Despite ever increasing attention to the issue of rural roads and several national and regional programmes for their development, only about 56% of the villages are yet connected by roads. All the rural development programmes support the rural road construction activities, but the route choice or the route location, to reach the main roads or towns, is not taken into consideration. In order to arrive at the methodology for choosing the road links and to avoid the multiple connections for a single village but ensuring that each village has at least one road connection, several network planning models have been developed. A close look at the available Rural Road Planning Models reveals that all the models except Facility-Based Optimal Rural Road-Network (FBRNP )Model have one or the other drawbacks. Some of these drawbacks are: choosing arbitrary values randomly without any scientific approach, absence of socioeconomic parameters, presence of hypothetical assumptions, incorporation of more number of parameters etc. Besides the absence of above mentioned drawbacks, its extensive study of socioeconomic impact, geographical transferability and flexibility to use for phase construction make the FBRNP model unique. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) represent an information technology composed of hardware, software, and data used to gather, store, edit, display, and analyse geographic information. The process of evaluating increasing volumes of information acquired from iii different sources lead to the development and the use of recent computer based GIS. A recent advance in the ability to collect accurate locational information in an economical fashion has catapulted GIS into the main stream of development activities associated with database management and integration with the application environment. Since the transportation applications like alignment are based on the geographical features, GIS poses a technology with considerable potential for achieving dramatic gains in efficiency and productivity. In this study, a graphical user interface has been provided to the FBRNP model. ArcView version 3.1 is found suitable to provide graphical user interface and a model is prepared to find the optimum network using the concepts of FBRNP model. After developing the FBRNP model in GIS environment, advancements that offered themselves are given below: i. Graphical representation of the network in all the stages ii. Less efforts to create database iii. Flexibility to take on-line decision iv. Better assessment of links v. Better recording of results vi. Possibility of change at later stage vii. Less time consuming for the input of data viii. More user friendly ix. Absence of Numbering adhocism The above listed advantages that are added to the FBRNP model have made it "Better than the Best."