# 2.5. Existing techniques of rural road planning in Nepal

Nepal’s forbidding terrain, low level of development, and underdeveloped data ecosystem complicate effective measurement of economic gains or accessibility changes from planned roads investments, let alone the implementation of advanced optimization models. Moreover, models built for planners must balance technical sophistication with communicative efficiency to policy makers and the public.

As such, policy makers in Nepal and India have favored rough, easily calculable measures of accessibility to set policy and measure progress. Nepali policy makers traditionally have measured accessibility policy goals in travel times, e.g. “85% of children should live within 30 minutes walking distance of a school” (Ministry of Education, Nepal and UNESCO Office Kathmandu, 2015). These figures are typically collected by interviews with local administrators or in one-off survey instruments, making them prone to manipulation and impossible to scale. Other accessibility metrics include reaching target dates for all villages of certain population sizes to be connected by all-weather roads (Kumar and Tillotson, 1991) or connecting a given percentage of key population groups (caste, ethnic, or age-based) to roads (LAHURNIP and IWGIA, 2014).

Accessibility models are rarely applied in the planning of Nepalese roadworks, where the level of methodological sophistication falls sharply from major to minor roads. Central authorities and collaborating donors typically evaluate major proposed “strategic” roads using welfare-based economic valuation methods. For instance, the World Bank’s forthcoming Strategic Road Connectivity and Trade Improvement Project (SRTIC) prepared a cost-benefit analysis of 12 road segments evaluating with- and without-project scenarios on the basis of combined vehicle operating cost and travel time savings (World Bank, 2019). But in practice this rigor is unusual and at a local level little to no proper evaluation is done (Coburn, 2020); in interviews in August 2018 and March 2019, staff at the Rural Access Programme spoke of how municipal authorities keen to demonstrate progress but lacking planning capacity frequently plowed roads into hillsides with little regard for environmental outcomes, investment efficiency, or even basic engineering principles.

Some efforts are underway to equip local authorities with access-based planning tools that accommodate their limited data collection and analysis capacity. Over the last 15 years the Rural Access Programme has worked with local governments in Nepal to design and implement Transport Master Plans that provide a measurable, data-driven basis for prioritizing proposed roads. The most recent iteration is the Provincial Transport Master Plan, a standardized tool for provincial governments to prioritize roads based on a spreadsheet matrix of cost projections, one day traffic density studies, policy priority, and the population totals of administrative centers touched by roads (Rural Access Programme (RAP3), 2019). An extract of the prioritization tool within Karnali’s draft Provincial Transport Master Plan is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Ranking road building options in Karnali’s draft Provincial Transport Master Plan (Rural Access Programme (RAP3), 2019).

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