Road maintenance groups: who keeps Nepal's hill roads open

A Road Maintenance Group (RMG) is how Nepal keeps a rural road in working order between big repair jobs: a small crew drawn from the villages beside the road, present all year rather than hired for a season¹. This page covers who is in the crews, what they repair and how they are paid and checked. The wider picture is in the rural roads hub, and the building of these roads is in how rural roads are built.

What an RMG is

The District Road Core Network (DRCN) is the set of main rural roads giving access to every village development committee, and its maintenance is the responsibility of the District Development Committee (DDC)⁴. The March 2016 guideline from the Department of Local Infrastructure Development and Agricultural Roads (DoLIDAR) put the network at about 22,000 km, with a further 5,159 km planned to reach villages without road access¹.

RMGs are an efficient and effective means of routine, recurrent and minor specific maintenance of the DRCN, so that the roads stay open year round¹. The guideline is a practical guide for the nationwide use of the approach, both under government funding and within rural road projects and programmes¹. The figures on this page are the March 2016 guideline’s; a later government guideline dated 2082 BS was a scanned file with no readable text and is not quoted. Its starting point was an International Labour Organization (ILO) conceptual guide, drawn from pilots in Dhanusha and Ramechhap districts in 2008-2009¹.

Why a group, not a seasonal contract

Damage cannot be prevented unless somebody is there to prevent it, and nobody knows exactly when it will happen, so a more or less continued presence is needed¹. Many countries, Nepal among them, have therefore chosen a continuous presence of maintenance workers over contracts at set times of the year¹.

On Nepal’s strategic roads each worker is allocated a particular length of road¹. On rural roads a variation applies: the workers on one road are grouped and are responsible for it as a group¹. The guideline gives three reasons the group form suits rural roads:

• Local authorities tend to lack the human and financial resources a length-worker system needs¹.
• Rural roads are generally earthen or gravel, with very localised problem areas that need extra attention¹.
• A group can reallocate its members according to need, putting extra time into the more problematic sections¹.

What the crews repair

The work is small and mostly unskilled. The guideline lists earthen side drains, repairs to the existing drainage system, removal of banks on shoulders, repairs to dry-stone retaining walls of under 5 m3 per wall and removal of hanging cliff or rocks of under 10 m3 per kilometre of road¹. Larger volumes are not the group’s job and are reported to the DDC or the District Technical Office (DTO)¹.

A February 2016 World Bank blog describes one worker’s day-to-day: she looked after routine maintenance, cleaned the drains, filled pits, cleared minor blockades and planted trees². The guideline sets a different standard on a blacktop road, which passes if there are no remarkable potholes larger than 30 x 10 cm that disturb the regular movement of traffic¹.

Roads in very poor condition are rehabilitated before an RMG takes them on¹. Periodic maintenance of an earthen road includes grading and reshaping of the pavement¹.

Who joins and how many

Members are selected from the communities along the road, or those nearest to it¹.

Selection also targets income: the guideline asks for people who are unemployed or employed less than 25% of their time¹.

Pay, plans and inspection

Individual bank accounts are opened for each member’s wages¹. The amount paid depends on the inspection results rather than on the number of days worked¹. Performance standards have to be met along the entire road length under contract¹. Work plans are prepared monthly by the DDC or DTO together with the RMGs¹.

The same blog reported that the workers had access to mobile banking, that accidental insurance and free health checkups were guaranteed by the programme, and that for many the job was a first experience of formal employment².

What it has changed

The February 2016 blog said that, before the World Bank-supported Strengthening National Rural Road Transport Program (SNRTP), routine maintenance on local roads was unheard of except for emergency repair². In February 2016 the blog reported that roads impassable during the monsoon were now navigable year round². One worker reported earning up to 11,000 rupees a month for six days of work a week (February 2016 blog)². One group of 12 men and women looks after a 24 km road from Nuwakot to Malabhanjyang². The same blog counted about 1,850 workers, mostly women from poor and marginalised communities, in 36 districts, maintaining about 3,300 km of local road².

An Itad policy brief describes the model as having a dual benefit: jobs for poor community members, and basic works that keep rural roads open all year³. It argues that the Government of Nepal and its development partners should consider continued and expanded use of RMGs in the new federal context³.

How Nepal classifies local roads

The Nepal Rural Road Standards (NRRS) were introduced in 2055 BS to set the classification and geometric design standards for the Local Road Network⁵. The standards document defines the District Road core network as the minimum network that gives maintainable, all-weather access to all VDC headquarters⁵. All roads not in the core network become village roads⁵. The standards divide terrain by cross slope: Terai covers 0 to 25 percent, and Hills 25 to 60 percent and more⁵. The carriageway of a District Road in the core network is 3.75 m, reducible to 3 m where traffic is under 100 motorised vehicles per day and is not likely to increase⁵.

A later programme: PLRIP, November 2024

The World Bank’s 21 November 2024 release says the US$128 million Provincial and Local Roads Improvement Programme, equal to NRs 17.15 billion, was launched that day⁶. Phase 1 combines five-year performance-based maintenance with routine maintenance by self-help groups⁶. It will maintain 400 km and 700 km of existing provincial roads and bridges⁶. It will be implemented in Sudurpashchim, Karnali and Madhesh provinces and 13 municipalities, and about one million people are expected to benefit from all-weather roads⁶. A tri-partite MoU was signed by federal, provincial and local governments for the three provinces⁶.

For what the rains do to these roads, see monsoon road closures; for the crossings that link them, see trail bridges.