Are the engineers getting trained in the proper road construction technology to improve their competency?
I jotted down this article after witnessing many highway engineers unaware of proper road construction methodology.
“Road accidents now lead the list of accidental deaths in India much more than drowning, fire, rail or air mishaps, etc. Nearly 260 people die on daily basis on Indian roads”
When the word “construction” appears somewhere, many things may strike a normal human mind. But most of the times, a person visualizes the construction of a “building” only. Even to a layman, civil engineers are the ones who construct buildings or bridges, which is not completely correct. Civil engineers solve a lot of problems of the human race and construction is just one of them. Again, construction doesn’t necessarily have to mean construction of buildings only. Civil engineers deal with the construction of structures as small as a cycle-stand to structures as large as a gravity dam. But, in between a layman mind can still forget to enumerate “road construction” in the list.
Roads have always played a major role in the development of the human race. From the invention of wheels to invention of missiles, human race would not have progressed this much had they forgot to work on the road technology simultaneously. The necessity to provide a hard surface to the wheel introduced the existence of roads thousands of years ago, but it brought the attention of modern engineering for the first time when heavy bombers and artilleries were to be carried by the US army during World War-II. Traditional pavements failed miserably to carry the loads of those weapons and hence new pavements were needed to be designed appropriately. Although, the intention was to carry the cause of humanity destruction, but it ultimately helped the civil engineers to evolve the pavement technology. Because of this technical evolution, later the civil engineers could come up with appropriate design methodology of road construction to carry even heavier loads.
But, “designing something on paper” and “executing the design on field” can never be two faces of a coin; they should rather be two axles of the same vehicle, one following another. In India, the road construction process is still not taken seriously, National Highways and Express Highways being exceptions, which again constitute only 4% of the road network.
So, regrettably it is a bitter truth that many Indian roads are not constructed competently to tackle the heavy loads of the vehicles. Out of many, the primary reason of such negligence is that failure of roads generally does not immediately yield any fatal accident, unlike failure of buildings, dams or bridges, where a sudden collapse takes many human lives instantaneously. That is why the energy of the engineers are always concentrated on constructing blunder free buildings, dams or bridges, but not particularly roads.
A small crack in a building or bridge draws attention of the users, but the same people silently accept the distresses present on a road surface, even if a pothole appears just two months after the construction of the road. When accidents take place because of such distresses on those roads, public rather blame the driver for his/her incompetent driving skills. Even in certain cases when the blame game gets directed towards the incompetent road, it is the illiterate contractor who is blamed, not the departmental engineer.
If the roads are designed as per the protocols, proper traffic and axle load surveys are conducted to aid the design and those designs are executed in the field as they are on paper, there is no way a road can deteriorate that rapidly even in the worst conditions. Before the construction of the road starts, the loads to be carried by the road need to be predicted, the thicknesses of the pavement layers need to be designed, the suitability of the materials to be used need to be tested, the exact percentage of bitumen to be added with the aggregates need be calculated and finally everything should get properly implemented at the site. So, the role of the engineers is very crucial in the entire process.
Unfortunately, in the undergraduate program of civil engineering, the road technology is not taught in details and hence most of the site engineers are not aware of the consequences of deviating from the design. So, to acquire the mastery in the road construction process, one needs to pursue higher education in the field of Transportation Engineering or need to undergo rigorous trainings before going to the field. The government has allocated ₹1,70,000 crore for the transport sector in the budget of 2020-21. This huge investment will only be justified if roads are designed and constructed appropriately. This will not only save maintenance costs, but also many lives at a later stage. We should keep in mind that with huge amount of taxpayers’ money, also comes huge responsibility of the engineers.