A Practical Guide to Using Khanna And Justo for Highway Engineering
Highway Engineering By Khanna And Justo 10th Edition
If you are studying highway engineering in an Indian university context, you are almost certainly working with the Khanna and Justo textbook at some point. It covers everything from traffic characteristics through geometric design to pavement analysis. The 10th edition was updated to bring things in line with IRC 73-1980 and later manuals, which matters because older editions reference design speeds and standards that no longer apply to current field work. I have gone through three editions across my degree and a few years of practice, so I can tell you what actually matters in each one and what you can safely skip. The book is dense. A first pass will feel overwhelming because it jumps between IRC specifications, empirical formulas, and theoretical derivations without much signposting. I found the most effective approach is to not read it cover to cover. Instead, map the chapters to your syllabus and focus on the sections that actually show up in exams or field reports. Chapters on cross drains and pavement design tend to be the heaviest. The traffic engineering sections are lighter but easy to skim over because the formulas look simple until you try to apply them to a real intersection. One thing the book handles better than most alternatives is the explanation of longitudinal gradient and vertical curve design. The worked examples walk through setback distance calculations for summit curves step by step. I spent a lot of time on these during my third year when I kept making mistakes on the sight distance assumptions. The trick is remembering that IRC uses different stopping sight distance values for hill roads versus plain terrain, and the book clearly separates them. I stopped mixing them up after I started writing down which formula applies to which design speed before plugging numbers in. That alone cut my calculation errors in half.
Pavement design is where the 10st edition differs noticeably from earlier prints. The earlier versions leaned heavily on the CBR method for flexible pavements. The 10th edition incorporates the IRC 37-2012 guidelines more thoroughly, which means the traffic estimation examples use cumulative commercial vehicle counts rather than just the old annual growth rate assumptions. If you are using an older edition, your numbers for layer thickness will be off by a reasonable margin. I checked this when a senior told me his pavement design came out too thin compared to what our project review expected. Switching to the 10th edition aligned everything with the latest IRC tables. Another chapter that trips people up is the one on highway drainage. The book explains cross drainage works but does not give as much detail on maintenance issues as you would get from a field manual. I ran into this during an internship when we had to assess a culvert that was underperforming. The textbook gave me the design side perfectly, but the question of silt accumulation and scour depth required looking at IRC 5 and local soil reports separately. I learned to treat the drainage chapter as a foundation, not a complete reference. There are a few structural problems with the book that are worth knowing about. The problem statements at the end of each chapter are useful, but the answer key in the back is sometimes incomplete. You will find a few numericals where only the final answer is given without the intermediate steps. This is frustrating when you are stuck on a unit conversion or a formula rearrangement. The workaround is to trace the example problem right before the exercise and follow its structure exactly. Most of the end-of-chapter problems are variations on the worked examples, not entirely new concepts.
The chapter on hill road alignment has a known limitation in the 10th edition. It discusses hairpin bends and switching tracks, but it does not fully address the geotechnical instability concerns that come up in active mountain terrain. I encountered this when preparing a design for a project in the Western Ghats. The textbook approach to gradient control works in theory, but real slope stability requires additional input from geotechnical engineering references. I supplemented the relevant sections with IS 1200 and some state PWD guidelines. This combined approach gave me results that held up under review. If you want a downloadable copy, the book is widely available through major academic publishers and online retailers. The official publisher isEngineering Publications, based in Lucknow. There are legitimate PDF versions circulating on university library portals and document sharing sites, though the legality of those varies by jurisdiction. I always check whether my college library has a scanned copy in their digital repository before hunting elsewhere. Most engineering colleges in India maintain at least one institutional license. The book is not perfect, but it is still the most accessible single volume for the core highway engineering syllabus in India. You will need to pair it with IRC codes for field-level accuracy, especially on pavement design and traffic analysis. The worked examples save time if you actually sit through them rather than skimming, because they reveal the typical mistakes made in exam settings. I kept a notebook of those examples during my final year, and it turned out to be more useful than any lecture notes I took. The formulas stick better when you have written them out by hand at least once.
Get the Full Details
One last thing that nobody tells you about this book: the diagrams are often more valuable than the text surrounding them. The cross-section drawings for road formation, the pavement layer details, and the intersection layouts are drawn clearly and labeled well. I learned to look at the figures first before reading the section text. It gives you a mental framework that makes the written material easier to parse. This is especially true for the superelevation and widening chapters, where the visual representation of the road profile clarifies things that the text describes awkwardly.
