I’ve been reading a lot about Goa’s pathetic roadways of late. Year after year, ministers keep promising to provide better roadway infrastructure, but nothing is done. Being in the field of pavement preservation and rehabilitation research, I’ve penned down a few ideas that might help Goa’s ailing roadways.
Firstly, make contractors responsible for quality control and ask them to provide a 3 year guarantee that the road will perform as promised. It’s easy for contractors to get away with using poor materials in a pavement’s subgrade, which plays an important role in load transfer. Poor subgrades are a leading cause of potholes. Also, contractors tend to pay little attention to drainage or the quality of the surface layer during construction. Improper air voids during compaction can cause a major durability problem down the road.
Secondly, the Government must start preventative maintenance on all major roads in the state. It seems that roads are constructed and simply let to fend for themselves. In truth, all pavements need preventative maintenance from time to time, starting as soon as 3 years after construction. Crack sealing, chip seals, fog seals and slurry seals all boost a pavements life, and the government has got to make sure that these maintenance tasks are performed in a timely manner or even the best of pavements can fail in time
Lastly, for Goa’s ailing roads, a cheap solution to fix a badly cracked surface or a road full of potholes are material recycling methods such as full depth reclamation and cold in place recycling. These techniques mill off either a few inches of the road surface (cold in place recycling) or the entire road surface layer and some of the bad subgrade below (full depth reclamation). The recycled materials are then stabilised with a stabiliser like lime slurry or asphalt emulsion and are laid down as a new subgrade. The road is then finished with a surface coat like a chip seal or a thin overlay. This saves the need for endless overlays and filling up of potholes, which are nothing more than cosmetic fixes.
