MEDIAN BASED APPROACH FOR LOCATING WARD CENTERS; A CASE STUDY OF TRIBENI RURAL MUNICIPALITY OF ROLPA DISTRICT

Abstract

Access to ward centers from settlement is important which plays significant role in saving the time of people. Especially in rural areas where settlement are more scattered and population density is low, ward center location plays a vital role for service delivery. The ward center locations from which the services are delivered in Nepal are not optimized to serve demand points i.e. settlement. In most of the cases ward centers are either in existing VDC Center or selected on ad-hoc basis. This research aims at the study the relationship between number of ward centers and population distance. For this study, Tribeni Rural Municipality of Rolpa district has been taken into consideration where there are seven existing ward centers to serve the population of 24,859. One hundred forty settlements (villages) are found which is treated as demand point and ward centers are service centers. P-Median model using python programming (with pulp library) is used to solve this location problem. In Tribeni Rural Municipality currently there are seven ward centers with average weighted distance of 3.6 km. We can vary the ward centers from five to twenty one as per the legal provision of Nepal, average weighted distance decreases from 4.38 km to 1.83 km.