ABSTRACT
Expensive soil is mostly found in arid and semi-arid regions and it covers very large area of the world. It covers nearly 20% of the land mass in India and includes almost the entire ocean plateau western Madhya Pradesh, Parts of Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh especially Bundelkhand belt, Karnataka & Maharashtra the swelling soil is commonly known by the name of black cotton soils swelling to occur, these soil initially unsaturated at same water content. If the unsaturated soil gains water content, it swells on the other band it decrease in Water content occur occurs the soil shrinks the presence of mantmorllonite clay in these soil imparts them high swell – shrink potentials. One of the major indicators of a country’s prosperity is its road length and vehicle Ownership India is a country where a large population lives in villages with their livelihood depending upon agriculture. Industrial growth is also shifting towards villages. Both of these activities require a better means of communication which can be provided by good conditioned roads3% village roads have very low volume of traffic, consisting mostly of rural transport vehicles, like agricultural tractors/trailers, light goods vehicles, buses, animal drawn vehicles, motorized two-wheelers and cycles. Some of the village roads may also have light and medium trucks carrying sugarcane, timber, quarry materials, etc. Flexible pavements are in use for village connectivity program because of low initial cost of construction to high cost of maintenance, being very sensitive to water logging and lack of institutional set up for their maintenance, the village roads deteriorate very fast, especially in expensive soil regions. Every year several kilometers of village roads are washed away by floods and water logging Thus, the planners and engineers are bound to think about the option of rigid pavement as a substitute of flexible pavement for village roads. Rigid pavement is an alternative to flexible pavement where the soil strength is poor, aggregate are costly and the drainage conditions are bad (as in portions of the roads passing through villages and water logged areas). However, they demand a high degree of professional expertise at the design stage, construction and maintenance besides high initial cost.
