Introduction:
Rural roads are an important sector in rural development, which deals in all aspects of development including agriculture, health, education, forestry, fisheries, small-scale industries, trade, commerce etc. that depends on good communication. Rural transportation network will give shape to the living environment of villagers; rather roads of rural transportation are the connectivity elements in our society. Appropriate combination of various links both technically and economically can generate rural traffic infrastructure, which should be prepared for the measure of land development. Rural road connectivity is not only the key component of Rural Development in India, it is also recognized as an effective poverty reduction programme. An improved accessibility to all quarters of a village is an indispensable prerequisite for the provision of adequate living conditions in rural areas. The interdependency in change of land use and transportation is not promoted in rural areas and this keeps the economic system inactive in these areas. The absence of roads in rural areas leads to stagnation of socio-economic conditions of the villagers.
The network planning should promote the objectives like accessibility and connectivity to most of the places in the region. There is a wide difference in the development of land use system in rural and urban areas. The settlements in urban sprawl will place, irrespective of local road network, whereas in rural areas, the resources are to be connected to the marketing centers for promoting transitional changes in socio economic status of people. A proper skeleton of road network will create a promotional impact of land use activity.
The present scenario in India warrants a serious thought on planning rural road network in a scientific way. The existing research work in the area of planning is limited to modification and upgradation of the existing planning approaches already developed. Attempts are being made to incorporate the socio-economic parameters, local transport system and transportation cost aspects. The existing regional rural road planning practices are mainly based on adhoc criteria and lack of scientific research, which are not giving any insight on pattern of connectivity. The current planning practice in India considers the connectivity based on the population of the villages and the small sized villages tend to get neglected in this method. The planning of rural road is not made in a comprehensive and co-ordinated manner.
Another imbalance is the rural urban dichotomy. In developing countries, though the percentage of population living in rural areas is high, still 50 - 75% of the villages are yet to be connected. At this juncture, there is an urgent need to develop a scientific methodology for the assessment of rural travel demand, which can promote a road network of hierarchical importance and wider range of connectivity basically from user, system owner and land use planning point of view.
Computers have been applied in planning almost since their inception, but only recently with the development of graphics, distributed processing, and network communications has software emerged which can now be used routinely and effectively. At the basis of these developments are Geographic Information Systems (GIS) but gradually, these are being adapted to the kind of decision and management functions that lie at the heart of the planning process. Using GIS to support a wide range of planning and management operations will make an enormous impact towards guiding the development and growth of rural areas. Rather than aiming at optimal solutions, pragmatic approaches must rely on the usage of heuristic problems capable of supporting the dynamic requirements of the domain. Hence the spatial entity when associated with the non-spatial attributes will be useful to achieve most rational infrastructure strategy. This is a key factor for applying GIS technology as a tool in supporting road network planning.
Rural Transportation scenario in India:
In the hierarchy of road system in India, rural roads include Other district roads (ODR) and Village roads(VR). There are about six lakh villages spread over 3.28 million square kilometers area. There were road development programmes like Minimum Needs Programme (MNP) and Basic Minimum Services programme (BMS) which envisaged provisions of connectivity to all villages and habitations by the end of 2002 AD. According to the recent study by Planning Commission only three-fifths of the nearly 6 lakh villages are known to be connected by all weather roads. In 2000, a Centrally Sponsored Scheme called the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana was announced with the objective of connecting every village that has population more than 500 persons by the year 2007.
Elements of successful rural road network:
- Identification of demand potential
- Wider coverage and Demand dominated connectivity
- Potential service centres
- Uniform coverage of village nodes
- Hierarchical linkage pattern
- Minimisation of gap between direct and indirect cost
Objectives:
The existing practices in rural road developments have to be tackled with scientific inputs for effective reorientation of network elements and also to subdue the inconsistent growth of land use activity in regional areas. In order to achieve a desired network to road user and system owner and to overcome the limitations in the current practices, following are considered as objectives of this study.
- To develop a simpler method of demand potential of nodes, which can serve as a proxy to the actual travel behavior of users.
- To develop a methodology which can identify uniform road connectivity for the compatible development of the area with GIS as a supporting tool.
- Coordination of existing road network and the proposed road network and develop the missing links.
- To assess and generate the road network configuration on the basis of demographic and socio-economic characteristics thus assessing the socio-economic impacts on the roads
- To develop a user, system owner based and cross composition based
network for wider coverage of the given area