How rural roads are built in Nepal's hills

Two documents frame how hill roads are built here: the Nepal Rural Road Standards, which set width, gradient and surface, and the Green Roads method, which describes who digs and how. The wider topic is in the rural roads hub; keeping a road working afterwards is covered in road maintenance groups.

The standards a road is built to

The Nepal Rural Road Standards set the classification and geometric design standards for the Local Road Network, to be followed by everyone involved in building it, from user committees and village committees to district development committees, district technical offices and the Department of Local Infrastructure Development and Agricultural Roads (DoLIDAR)³. They were revised in 2010 while interim guidelines for District Transport Master Plans were prepared for the pilot districts³. Terrain is split into two classes, and the hill class covers mountainous and steep country with a cross slope from 25 to 60 percent and more³.

The core district network is defined as the minimum network that gives maintainable, all-weather access to every village headquarters; roads outside it become village roads³. On hairpins, drainage is part of the design: water from the bend must not cause erosion problems on the slope³.

Choosing the line

The first design decision is where the road goes. The choice between a ridge and a valley road, and between south-facing and north-facing slopes, needs careful evaluation². Aligning along a ridge, especially with a south-west aspect, helps avoid drainage problems and excess moisture and frost, and uses sunlight to keep the road dry¹. Local knowledge helps too: surveys that draw on it follow traditional routes that people already know well¹.

The Green Road concept sets itself against a common alternative: uncontrolled and hasty, often mechanised construction by inappropriate bulldozers in a fragile mountain environment, causing massive soil erosion².

Building by hand

Under the Green Roads approach construction uses manual labour to create off-farm jobs, aims to be low cost, and needs about 12,000 person-days per kilometre¹. In a 2000 account a Green Road cost Rs 10-12 lakh per kilometre to build¹.

The method is built around local materials:

• Dry stone walls, without cement, fill the roadbed; they are the most common local technique¹.
• Retaining structures in dry and gabion walls, stone water management and bioengineering are the key elements².
• Excavated material is reused as fill through mass-balancing¹.
• Shrubs and trees planted along the edges help stabilise earthen banks¹.
• The road surface gets a slight outward slope to disperse rainwater and limit gully erosion¹.
• Large rock is cracked by heating it with a fire and pouring cold water on it, because blasting causes deep fractures that can lead to large landslides¹.

Construction is phased. Widening the track gradually avoids handling large amounts of excavated material and lets monsoon rain compact the earthwork¹. Widening is gradual, over three phases². A farmer in the 2000 account described the order: in the first year a one-metre path is cut and the earth fills low places, then dry walls and check dams are built, and the following years dig out more¹. Upgrading is staged too, starting as a single-lane road with a natural surface and growing with traffic and funds².

Who works, and on what terms

The annual building period is fitted to the local slack season in farming so that people are not pulled from their fields¹. Labourers are paid for the amount of work done rather than a fixed daily rate, which gives an incentive to progress quickly¹. Women earn from the construction work and are paid the same as men for equal work¹. Children under sixteen years of age are not allowed to work on the projects¹.

Maintenance continues the same logic: it needs about 200 to 300 person-days per kilometre per year¹.

Who decides

In the Green Roads model the people who benefit decide on the project, its alignment, labour management, group formation and the use of resources¹. In the Green Road concept, Local Road Coordination Committees and Road Building Groups give preference for off-farm work to local labourers². a District Technical Office implements the works, with local NGOs or consultants supervising construction². Disputes go to Local Road Co-ordination Committees¹, landowners who give land are compensated indirectly through higher land values¹, and public audits publish funds and spending, for example on sign boards².

In the 2000 account Dadeldhura district was totally inaccessible by vehicle until 1990, over 65% of the resources of the food-for-work programme described went into rural road building, and the district development committee’s first plan was to link all twenty village committees¹. The district is described in the Dadeldhura guide. Roads like this are planned district by district: participatory planning builds the consensus needed to prepare the District Transport Master Plan¹, explained in district transport master plans.

Jobs and incomes

The Engineers Against Poverty briefing note describes the Rural Access Programme, developed by the UK Department for International Development, as linking poor communities to the national network with low-cost roads⁴. Between 2001 and 2008 more than 300 km of earth roads were built through mountainous terrain in remote areas, and the briefing note reported a significant increase in the incomes of 12,000 households⁴. Maintenance work on the road creates further employment⁴. A wider briefing note finds that using labour in place of equipment can generate up to five times more employment⁴.