The vision of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) is to have a sustainable, efficient, safe and internationally comparable quality of road infrastructure in general, and a national highways infrastructure in particular, to achieve enhanced connectivity and quick mobility to a level that will accelerate socio-economic development.
The primary focus of MoRTH is to develop the national highways (NHs) network in the country into a road network of international standards for uninterrupted flow of traffic, with enhanced safety features. Evolving policies for efficient and safe transportation through the road network and facilitating their implementation is also one of the major focus areas of MoRTH.
Apart from this, improving the road safety scenario in the country, especially on national highways, is of high importance; it can be achieved by promoting information technology for facilitating online services for the stakeholders and strengthening the public transport system.
Over the years, the speed of road construction has become the benchmark for India’s infrastructure creation. The Central Government has been trying to leverage roads, railways and waterways to bring India’s logistics costs down to 8% to make the economy competitive.
In the process, the government has revived the highway sector, which was reeling under stress and lack of private investment. The government has also set ambitious plans, such as the Bharatmala (roads), to improve the transport infrastructure.
The total investment for the Bharatmala project is pegged at Rs 10 trillion, which is considered to be the largest ever outlay for a government road construction scheme. With an average speed of 37 km per day, the construction of national highways during 2020/2021 has been the highest ever in the last five years, despite the COVID-19 crisis and months of lockdown. The total length of national highway construction, up to February 5, 2021, was 9,242 km.
The government has taken steps to manage national highways and road assets using different geospatial technologies — unmanned aerial vehicles are being used to monitor and manage national highways and road assets.
Satellite data and geospatial technology are useful in providing inputs to highway and infrastructure projects for preparation of detailed project reports (DPRs), pre-feasibility status in new alignment, upgrades and road widening, monitoring of road segments under construction, and for the Road Asset Management System. Drone technology finds its use in monitoring, construction progress, Road Asset Management, feasibility report and DPR preparation, and immediate assessment and remedy of problematic spots.
With the Government of India investing significantly in highway construction projects, the need for adopting integrated geospatial technologies is strongly evident — particularly for design-to-execution quality and enhanced productivity.
Advancements in the design industry from 2D CAD drawings to 3D digital models have specifically linked design process, role, and stakeholder. From pre-construction to the operations and maintenance phase, drones have proven to be of use during each lifecycle of a transport construction project. There is a seamless integration and collaboration of resources and stakeholders, with data being shared in real time.
Apart from drones, advancements in 4IR technologies (including Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data Analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and BIM) create Digital Twins, that is, almost complete virtual replicas of the built environments.
These platforms combine real-time information feeds from various sensor networks and intelligent systems. All these technologies together are playing an enabling role in improvement of workflows and processes related to highway construction projects. Additionally, this will also reduce the silos in project execution, whilst increasing productivity and reducing errors and reworks.
The Indian highway construction sector faces numerous challenges from project conceptualization to operations and maintenance stage. Despite its prominent stake in the economy and society, the sector’s performance has lagged tremendously behind other industrial sectors in terms of digitalization. Highway construction involves varying levels of complexities from design and engineering to build and maintenance stage.
The build stage in the highways sector has been traditionally plagued by shortcomings in inter-departmental collaborations, adverse environmental conditions, contractors’ non-performance, skilled manpower, equipment breakdown and idle time. In the case of build stage of airport infrastructure, challenges are largely related to change in design/scope and planning in-silos.
Highway infrastructure projects represent some of the major advancements in engineering technology, tipping the scales in many dimensions — size, complexity and cost.
With large-scale investment, design complexities, and lasting impact on future infrastructure assets, these projects are prone to significant project execution risk and massive cost overruns. These challenges are often a result of project data gaps, which lead to significant material wastage, cost and time overruns, and continuous reworks, resulting in massive delays and loss of capital.
Though quite a few geospatial technologies have already entered the Indian highway construction industry, there still exist challenges for smoother adoption of these technologies. Some of the common challenges are lack of digital awareness and coordination among stakeholders.
The stakeholders need to understand that application of content-enabled (multi-disciplinary on-site data), connected (near real-time off-site to field collaboration) and constructible workflow (using as-built data) has proven successful in reduction of disjointed design-to-execution workflows.
Integration of on-site technology solutions with off-site platforms changes the outlook of transport infrastructure projects by structuring the available datasets and streamlining the information for an efficient workflow benefitting each stakeholder. These integrated solutions will provide a collaborative approach in integration of lifecycle data, resulting in increased returns on investments and compliance of project time and cost.
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