India's road network is huge: the road length is more than 3.01 million kilometres, including 34,608 km of National Highway, 128,622 km of State Highway and an informal network of 2,737,080 km. These roads operate in very different social, economic and climatic environments. Management and planning of such a vast network is done at two levels, national and local. Planning at the national level is broad and uses macro-level attributes and data such as gross domestic product and area, while at the local level it is more problem specific and confined to the vicinity of a few metropolitan cities.
One study in India found that, for lack of relevant data, road network planning was not based on travel demand requirements, and that major planning of road networks has suffered from the lack of data. Even when data was available, the issue was access and management: valuable information on existing transport infrastructure is scattered around the country in various organizations. At the state level, attributes of the NH, SH and MDR networks are available in bits and pieces in different organizations and are rarely used effectively. In practice, the location data available has not been used optimally.
One of the issues highway networks face is deterioration for lack of funds for infrastructure. In such a scenario GIS becomes a ray of hope, because it can improve decision making about how to use the available funds in a better and smarter way. GIS is widely used in transportation by planning agencies and metropolitan transportation organizations. Highway maintenance management is among the most critical issues in almost every country, so authorities turn to GIS for highway and transport management.
GIS helps transport planners collect, store and analyze data on population density, land uses, travel behavior and more. Typical uses include highway maintenance, traffic modelling, accident analysis, route planning, and the environmental assessment of road schemes through a better understanding of topography, land cover and environmental impact.
The objective of GIS is to map, display and integrate data for a better understanding of attributes and to ease decision making. Governments and agencies look critically at the data to identify advantages, disadvantages and potential issues, make the process efficient and effective, use resources optimally and, at large, develop better transportation policy and planning.