Meet Mr Jai Prasad (BBMP) on Road Standards

Two of us met with Shri JaiPrasad of BBMP.  Some good information that I gathered on this was -

o Of course they are aware of IRC standards and he himself is on one of the IRC bodies. However, IRC is just a guideline and there is no compulsion to use it.

o As we all know, it has rarely been followed.

o Very difficult to retrospectively apply the standards to done roads. However, he agrees very much that new layouts and new roads should be built to the requisite standards.

o BBMP (and I think BDA) do not have a seperate standards body which specifices standards for Bangalore roads. They are trying to come out with a handbook, but a cursory look at it and it is what I suspected. Heavily focussed on the material and construction aspect, with little or no focus on the geometric design aspect.

o One of the major problems with the IRC docs, is that it is a series of docs over decades, with different committees coming up with different standards at different points of time. At times there is overlap, and a given aspect of road will be strewn over many such documents. Basically one needs to read through N number of documents and synthesize it, a herculean task and should not be expected for every PWD engineer to do it. THe good thing is IRC themselves recognize the problem and are trying to bring a comprehensive revision which will have much lesser booklets/documents to cover all aspects.

Now the really positive aspect of the meeting

o We went through the document we are trying to create, which will be a single reference to all aspects of geometry of road design.

o He expressed keen interest in the document  and said it would be  usefull.

o He said it is a very good thing, and he definitely thinks it could be usefull to BBMP and IRC. Since he is one of the committe members in the IRC revision process, this could come in handy.

o once we are done with the complete stuff, he is open to consider us conducting a workshop with BBMP engineers and basically apprise them of it.

I think it is great that he is open and keen on improvement. I dont think we should go about only criticizing and asking why this has not happened so far etc. We should see where we can add value to the current system and then go ahead and do it.

THis is probably a very good opportunity for all of us to directly influence the standards and make sure it is comprehensive enough so that we dont get into issues later of pedestrian crossings, road divider walls too high or too low, roads not being pedestrian freindly, lane driving etc etc. If you can volunteer great, but at least do go through it and come up with your criticisms, and your points which you think should be added

Suhas