1 Overview of Rural Roads Sahadev Bahadur Bhandari Chief District Engineer, District Technical Office, Dang / Ph.D. student Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus email: sbbhandari@ioe.edu.np Abstract This article reviews the existing rural road situation worldwide. The importance and overall status of rural roads in different countries, including China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Kenya, the USA, Australia and Nepal are studied. The article discusses rural road length and rural road policy and programs in these countries. Furthermore, it provides some suggestions for the overall development of rural roads. Key Words: Rural Roads, Rural Access Index, Sustainability 1. Introduction About half the world’s population lives in rural areas. The rural road plays an important role in the overall development of these areas. It provides accessibility and mobility for the rural dwellers, providing economic, physical, social and political links, and facilitating the exchange of the products of the urban areas and the raw materials of the rural areas. Although different projects bring different returns, the investment in rural roads brings greater economic impact ahead of education, agriculture and health (World Highways, 2011) . Rural Roads are a road network that is not in an urban setting. These are roads with a low traffic volume, which connect different communities, provide market access to farms and farmland and have lower design speed. Rural roads are generally owned by local authorities. Eighty-five percent of 33.8 million kilometres of classified roads in the world are lower volume rural roads with average traffic of less than 1000 vehicles per day. Fifty-nine percent of these road networks belong to eight nations, namely the USA, China, India, Brazil, Japan, Canada, France and Russia, and each country has at least one million km of rural road networks. The global assets of these rural road networks are 7.6 trillion US dollars , which is equivalent to about 50% of the estimated 2010 GDP of the USA. On average, 0.23 km per square kilometre of the earth’s land? (the area of the earth’s land mass is 148.9 million square kilometres) is a rural road (Faiz, Faiz, Wang, & Bennett, 2012). One billion, which is 31% of the world’s rural population still live more than 2 km from an all-weather road, isolated from markets and services. Accessibility, which is measured with the "Rural Access Index (RAI) i.e. population within 2 km of an all-weather road, varies greatly between developed and developing countries (world highways, 2013). For instance, the RAI for developed countries such as the USA is 86%, Germany-89%, Italy-98% Japan-99%, France 99%, Austria 95%, UK -96%. On the other hand, the least developed countries have a very low RAI (e.g. Sudan-5%, Chad 5%, Nepal 17%, Burundi