Thin and ultra-thin whitetopping for upgrading bituminous pavements

摘要

Although concrete pavements staged a come back in India in the 1990s and are now consid-ered as a viable option to the bituminous pavements for certain set of conditions, the share of concrete in the total paved roads in the country is abysmally low. A number of factors are responsible for this state of affairs, chief amongst which include the non-availability of adequate quantity of cement for road works for almost four decades after independence, the practice of stage construction prevalent in the state and the central highway departments which favoured the bituminous alternative, the higher initial cost of the concrete pavements and the reluctance to adopt the life-cycle cost approach. As a result, it is no wonder that an overwhelming majority of the paved roads in the country, that is more than 99 percent, are of the bituminous variety.