How Tamil Nadu uses a World Bank funded IT-based model for road maintenance

CHENNAI: Drive long enough on any state highway or district road in India and you are likely to find the road good, fairly good, bad and very bad – in patches. Invariably , the stretches that need repair do not get it on time while a select few corridors are better maintained. But one state has sought to change this by developing an IT-based model that could transform the way roads are maintained in the country.

Implemented under a recently concluded World Bank-assisted project, the Road Management System (RMS) developed by Tamil Nadu set itself a simple goal. Given its limited funds for road maintenance, the state highways department wanted a set of objective criteria to decide which roads to repair on priority.

However, as project director P Umanath put it, being objective about upkeep of the state’s roads is not easy. “Our system has to show it is objective and transparent in identifying roads that need repairs most urgently,” he says.
The system consists of creating a database on the condition of each road through specialized data-collection vehicles whose movements are plotted through a geographical information system (GIS).

This is supplemented with surveys on the volume of traffic on each stretch. Based on these two sets of data, a software displays the state of each road (on a six-category scale from ‘very good’ to ‘very bad’ ). This determines which roads need repairs – and of what type – in a given time, in accordance with the available budget.

The data-collecting vehicles , called Romdas (Road Measurement Data Acquisition System), have devices to measure road roughness, bumps, cracks and potholes. They also have video cameras to visually capture a stretch. The state initially acquired two Romdas vehicles . Later, two yet more advanced vehicles were procured with laser crack measurement systems.

“RMS is not only about maintaining roads. The data has also helped us widen some stretches and make some design changes,” said G Kumar, deputy project director of the Rs 2,442 crore Tamil Nadu Road Sector Project , under which RMS was implemented.

The department claims that better road management has helped cut travel time on two corridors, Nagapattinam-Tuticurin and Nagapattinam-Arcot , by as much as 40%. The project currently includes 18,500km of state highways and district roads.

Experts say elements that make up RMS are tried and tested methods of scientific road management. The system , however, is yet to pass a crucial test. The department will soon conduct a road user satisfaction survey.

(The writer was hosted by World Bank while preparing this report)