Contents

“American roads are good not because America is rich, but America is rich because American roads are good.” — John F. Kennedy. India has a road network of over 5,472,144 kilometres (3,400,233 mi) as on 31 March 2015, the second largest road network in the world. Expansive soils are typically clays that demonstrate extensive volume and strength changes at varying moisture content due to their chemical composition. The main causes of premature failures of road pavements is attributed to expansive subgrade soils and poor drainage, leading to severe cracking and heave on road surface. The amount of certain clay minerals that are present, such as montmorillonite and smectite, directly affect the shrink-swell capacity of soil. This ability to drastically change volume can cause damage to existing structures. The aim of this paper is to highlight issues of expansive subgrades & suggest some workable solutions so that highway engineers can improve design and construction methodology of pavement on expansive soils. As per a report, “Expansive clay soil causes more damage to U.S. commercial and residential property each year than all hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes and floods combined”.

Literacy is an important part of every person’s life. Normally, we know literacy means the ability of reading, write, view, design, listen and speak in a way which allows us to communicate to each other effectively[12]. The area of literacy does not depend on the only read or write, in nowadays, literacy meaning has extended to include the ability to use Languages, Computer, Images, the Internet, Information Interchange and so on. The idea of literacy is extending in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations to include skills to approach information through innovation and capacity to survey complex settings[19].

Vocational education system relates to programmes of study with job readiness. Though vocational education is non-formal in nature and focuses primarily on industry specific trade, occupation or vocational study enabling grass-root level people to acquire job specific skills based on hands-on-practice and/or training for their gainful employment. The Indian education system recognizes the role of vocational education, keeping in view the demand of highly skilled labour force both in the government as well as private/business sectors. The Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) set up by the Government of India plays an important role in co-ordination with its allied bodies like- National Skill Development Agency (NSDA), National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), Sector Skill Councils (SSC) and training partners for fulfilling the industrial requirements of trained and skilled manpower, besides skill up-gradation, and building of new skills not only for existing jobs but also aiming at jobs that are to be created in near future. Notwithstanding that there are many areas in which India is facing challenges to overcome problems in implementation of vocational education in regard to quality and employability, the paper intends to emphasize on some aspects of quality, employability and Government’s role in vocational education programme implementation.

Forest are the basis for sustaining the ecosystem and helps cleanse the environment and provides shelter food for life dependent on it. Humans owe a great responsibility in preserving the remaining forests and take preventive steps towards the destruction of forest. One of the major cause for forest destruction are forest fires. So this project deals with the development of an intelligent real time and automatic early warning system for forest fire. It enables remote monitoring of conditions inside the forest regions and creates an alert when an forest fire is detected by unique mail and sms, the sensor data are constantly monitored along with a gps location for each sensor node which are connected together by Zigbee modules capable of long range transmission, the simple battery monitoring system allows constant monitoring of power usage of the entire setup. On the whole this prototype model when implemented will be a cost effective way for preventing forest fires.