# Roads Development Optimization for All-Season Service Accessibility Improvement in Rural Nepal Using a Novel Cost-Time Model and Evolutionary Algorithm

Andries Heyns<sup>a,b,∗</sup> , Robert Banick<sup>c</sup> , Suraj Regmi<sup>c</sup>

> aHumanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Research Institute, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland

> bLaboratory for Location Science, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

> cWorld Bank, Poverty and Equity Global Practice

## 1. Background

Due to Nepal’s lack of infrastructure and accessibility challenges brought upon by severe terrain and isolated rural populations, roadworks construction is an important element of development plans made by the Nepali government. Improved transportation links are seen as key to reducing food insecurity and unlocking the economic potential of rural areas (Thapa and Shively, 2017). As a result, Nepal’s total road length has proliferated from a base of 2,700 km in the 1970s to over 80,000km in 2015; over 7,500km of new roads were built in 2017 and 2018 alone (World Bank, 2017; Ministry of Finance, 2015). Further propelling this spree are local political economies wherein every incentive aligns towards more road building: constituents routinely cite roads as the highest priority in meetings or surveys (Sapkota, 2018; World Bank, 2016).

A significant portion of recent road construction, particularly at the local level, is characterized by a lack of policy coordination, little to no study of anticipated benefits, haphazard construction standards, and disregard for environmental safeguards (World Bank, 2018). Accessibility improvements are unstructured and fragmented since roads are often built based on political expediency, without reference to studies or master plans (Coburn, 2020; World Bank, 2018). Furthermore, the government’s capacity is so constrained that it usually only spends 70%-80% of its capital budget and the average lifespan of roadworks projects is 12 years (World Bank, 2017). Besides perpetuating an infrastructure gap, these delays degrade the accuracy and resulting informational value of standard measures of project worth – e.g. Net Present Value (NPV) (Belli et al., 2001) or Adjusted Present Value (APV) (Myers, 1974) – and hinder the synchronization of infrastructure investments with other development activities. This is unfortunate, given that Nepal’s scarce resources and harsh terrain merit meticulous, targeted approaches to maximize gains. Mechanisms for integrated planning at the provincial and municipal levels are under development but their adoption is inconsistent and the methods are relatively basic (Rural Access Programme (RAP3), 2019) when compared to established ones previously implemented by the national government in collaboration with donors (World Bank, 2019).

Nepal’s northwestern Karnali province (also known as Province 6) exhibits extreme levels of inaccessibility even by Nepal’s standards. With a predominantly rural population, access to critical services is often measured in hours, walking is a primary transport modality, and it contains the only two districts (of 77) whose headquarters are not connected by vehicular roads of any sort, Humla and Dolpa (Devkota et al., 2012). An illustration of the magnitude of Karnali’s accessibility challenges is provided in Figure 1, in which the provincial population share with long average travel times to financial institutions is markedly higher in Karnali than all other provinces (Banick and Kawasoe, 2019).

Like much of Nepal, damages from rains and landslides further constrain access to services during Nepal’s June-September monsoon season, when heavy rains intensely damage almost all of Karnali’s poorly maintained roads (Huber, 2015). In Figure 2, examples of typical monsoon road conditions in Karnali are provided, showing their vulnerability to bad weather. Significant reductions in travel speeds (40%-80%) for affected road segments are common during this season, particularly for poorly engineered roads with inadequate drainage, and/or poor surfaces (Pantha et al., 2010). Since terrain and available budget effectively prohibit redundancy in roads, damage to a single road can severely impact entire regional populations.

> ∗Corresponding author, contactable at andries.heyns@hanken.fi