The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has announced that it will deploy Network Survey Vehicles (NSVs) in 23 states, covering 20,933 km of National Highways (NHs), for the collection, processing, and analysis of road inventory and pavement condition data. The agency has said that these specialised vehicles will enable it to collect necessary data related to road and pavement condition, including all relevant road defects such as surface cracking, potholes, and patches.
The NHAI has faced criticism regarding the poor condition of NHs, which leads to accidents and fatalities if it is not maintained properly. There are existing policy guidelines on surveying with NSV, which have been in place since 2019, mandating that the authority’s engineer and an independent engineer conduct surveys with NSV before issuing completion certificates for newly built highway stretches.
Now, with this new assignment, NHAI aims to collect all necessary data by conducting various surveys and accessing available data from concerned agencies, processing and analysing the same and uploading it on the Road Asset Management System (RAMS) in the prescribed format.
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has developed RAMS (also called Datalake) to create a single road database for planning, budgeting, managing and maintaining the entire NH network in India through a systematic and scientific life cycle analysis.
How do NSVs work?
An NSV is usually a specialised van or SUV equipped with multiple sensors and instruments, such as Laser, Global Positioning System (GPS), Video image processing tools, High-resolution cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), and DMI (Distance Measuring Indicator).
These vehicles will collect data on the condition of NHs. The collected data will be further used to make decisions for pavement maintenance, asset management, and infrastructure planning.
Officials said that the data will be collected for all projects involving 2/4/6 and 8 lanes with NSV before the start of work and thereafter at regular intervals of six months.
The pavement condition surveys will be carried out using a 3D laser-based NSV system, which is capable of capturing and reporting road defects automatically without any human intervention, with the help of high-resolution 360-degree cameras and other tools.
Who will conduct the survey?
NHAI has invited bids this month from qualified companies to implement this initiative. According to the terms of reference (TOR), the survey will capture 13 types of defects, including crack measurement, ravelling, patch area, potholes, edge break, roughness, rutting, lane marking, etc.
It will also cover details like carriageway type, road type, pavement and shoulder width, topography, median details, right of way, utilities, land use, etc.
Where will the survey be conducted?
The total length of NHs in India is 1.46 lakh km. Out of this, over 50,000 km stretch is managed by NHAI. According to the bid document, a total of 20,933 km stretch, covering 91,280 km lane length, has been identified for this special survey. It has been divided into five packages: north (2,687km), west (3,915km), centre (4,616km), south (4,537km), and east (5,179km).
In the north, it will cover states like Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu & Kashmir. Similarly, Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh in the centre, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala in South and Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Meghalaya,
Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal in the east will be covered under the survey with NSV.
No bidder will be awarded more than one package.
Vehicles hit a pothole near Shapar on National Highway 27 on the outskirts of Rajkot in August. (Photo: Chirag Chotaliya) 
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