CHAPTER -1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 General
The importance of having a proper road network for the development of the country was realized
quite early in India. The first road development plan known as Nagpur Plan (1941-1961) highlighted
the long-term road infrastructure requirements of the country and classified the road network into a
functional hierarchy comprising National Highways, State Highways, Major District Roads, Other
District Roads and Village Roads. Out of these, the Other District Roads (ODRs) and Village Roads
(VR) were categorized as Rural Roads. ODRs are feeder roads serving the rural areas where
agriculture is the predominant occupation, providing outlets to urban market centres. These low
volume roads play a significant role in the development of backward areas and in accelerating the
socio-economic development of the country.

During subsequent road development plans also, rural roads have received significant attention and
emphasis. A number of programmes such as the minimum needs programme (MNP), National Rural
Employment Programme (NREP), Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP) and
Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) was launched to achieve the goal of rural connectivity. In the recent
past, the ministry of rural development, Government of India, has launched a massive road building
program called the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna (PMGSY) for connecting the unconnected
villages with all-weather roads.

Conventional flexible pavements consisting of granular sub-base and base with a thin wearing course
of bituminous layer are commonly adopted for rural roads. The thick layers of granular base and sub-
base use significant quantities of aggregates. Many states in India face the problem of scarcity of
road quality aggregates. Cost of aggregates continues to escalate due to restrictions imposed on the
quarrying industry from environmental considerations. In many places, carriage cost of aggregates is
very high resulting in high cost of construction of roads. Further, these roads require frequent
maintenance due to the damage caused by overloaded vehicles and poor drainage conditions
prevailing in villages. In the absence of adequate fund and timely maintenance, the serviceability
level of the roads deteriorates rapidly.

To offset such expensive maintenance cost, concrete pavements are increasingly used in rural
road connectivity in India because of their durability. However it not only involves high initial
cost but can also fail due to various reasons like day and night variations in warping stresses,
seasonal changes in the modulus of sub-grade reaction etc.

Although pre-cast concrete block pavement provides more flexible response (depending upon the
dilantancy of the jointing sand) as compared to the normal concrete pavement mentioned above,
there is a tendency for block movements under braking or accelerating force of the vehicular
traffic and the interlocking caused by the jointing sand needs frequent maintenance which may
not be practical for rural roads.

It is, therefore, necessary to explore alternate types of pavements that can be constructed using
locally available materials and which require less maintenance.
The full-scale tests conducted by Mitchell et al. (1979) at U.S. Army Engineer Waterways
Experiment Station (WES) have shown that interconnected shallow, thin walled plastic cells placed
over a soft sub-grade and filled with sand can provide significantly greater load-carrying capacity
than can be provided by the compacted soil alone.

As an alternative, for better structural performance and low maintenance, a new pavement
technology called Plastic Cell Filled Concrete Block Pavement (PCCBP) was developed in South
Africa (Visser, 1994, 1999; Visser and Hall, 1999, 2003) and appears to be very promising for
low-volume roads. The pavement developed consisted of (i) spreading a formwork of cells of plastic
sheet held under tension over a compacted base (ii) filling the cells with single size aggregates (iii)
compaction of aggregates and (iv) grouting of aggregates with cement-sand mortar. In another type
of construction, normal concrete / self-compacting concrete was used for making cell-filled concrete.
Due to the flexibility of the cast-in-situ concrete block, such pavement is termed as Flexible
Concrete Pavements. The size of each cell is usually 150 mm 150 mm with the depth of cell
varying from 50 mm to 150 mm depending upon the traffic load. The cells are stretched along the
carriageway and tensioned by using steel pegs and filled up with a suitable pavement material and
compacted using a roller. During compaction, cell walls deform providing interlocking vertical joints
between adjacent blocks.

Whereas, in the case of pre-cast concrete block pavements, concrete pavers are set in bedding
sand and the spaces between the individual paving units is filled with clean quality joint sands,
PCCBP are cast-in-situ concrete blocks where there is interlocking between the individual blocks
with plastic between the blocks. The PCCBP has good load spreading capacity with competitive
lifecycle cost with conventional pavement types.

A cell-filled pavement was built in April 2004 on an experimental basis at Rakhal Garia, a village
situated 10 km from IIT Kharagpur. Thickness of the cell-filled layer is 100 mm. Usually four to five
trucks carrying stone chips, sand, and bricks operate on the road daily. The pavement has already
served for six years and it is still in a sound condition without any maintenance. FWD test conducted
on this pavement gave modulus values between 3500 MPa to 5000 MPa for the cell concrete layer.
Performance of the road clearly indicates that the cell-filled technique is a very promising alternative
to the traditional pavements for low volume roads.

1.2 Need for the Present Study

Considering the potential of the technique of cell-filled pavement construction and also the concern
about scarcity of aggregates at many locations, it is essential to examine the feasibility of adopting
cell-filled pavement technique in rural roads. It is, therefore, necessary to investigate cell-filled
concrete pavement construction in the rural area of Guntur district where the subgrade soils are poor
and procurement of road materials in large quantities is an expensive affair.

1.3 Objective and Scope of the Work

In the light of the discussion presented in the preceding paragraphs, the broad objective of the present
work is to construct cell-filled concrete pavement in the rural area of Guntur district on experimental
basis to gain insight into the performance of cell-filled pavements constructed with different
materials and laid over different sub-bases.
For realizing the objectives of the present work, the following scope has been selected.
1. Construction of cell-filled concrete pavement using two different types of construction
techniques i.e., 1) Grouting technique & 2) Premix technique and to study which technique
will be more suitable in rural areas where skilled supervision is not possible.
2. Economic assessment of Cell Filled Concrete Pavement vis-a-vis conventional flexible
and rigid pavements.