ADVANCED INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR PLANNING AND MAINTENANCE OF RURAL ROAD USING GIS

Abstract

Rural roads are important roads within a district connecting areas of production with markets and connecting these with each other or with the State and National Highways. The rural transport infrastructure consists of roads, tracks, and their associated bridges and other forms of water crossings. The major constraints on access to rural areas is the unavailability of database. This study has undertaken an extended attempt to develop Geographic Information System (GIS) based rural road database so that planners, decision makers, researchers and other different level authorities in the rural road sector will be benefited from the final output. The study area is located in Warangal District, Telangana, India. The study also aimed to select the shortest and alternative paths from different villages towards growth centres using Dijkstra algorithm. Network analysis has been conducted to select shortest path, in terms of travel time, between two locations in the study area. Growth centres has been selected, from 37 habitations found in the study area, based on the cumulative weightage of rural infrastructures and the number of trough-routes they have. Hasanparthy village was designated as a growth centre of the mandal with high value of cumulative result. Furthermore, structural analyses of the road in the study have been done based on connectivity indexes and maintenance strategy was developed based on population benefited by the link and average PCI value of the link.