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Sustainable pavement is the need of the hour using the mechanistic and robust pavement design approach, eliminating empiricism in the present IRC SP 72-2015 design guidelines, if any. Giroud and Han (2004) (GH) approach has confirmed existing empiricism in IRC SP 72-2015 design guidelines and permits the use of locally available material, thus saving transportation costs and reducing air pollution. IRC SP 72 – 2015 recommends design thickness only for the unreinforced condition in gravel roads for the maximum rut of 50mm. This paper presents the comparative study of an unreinforced and geotextile-reinforced gravel road design for Indian conditions with the rut as a vital design parameter using the GH method for subgrade classes with 2% to 5% CBR and the maximum traffic count of 100,000. The proposed unique equation provides Allowable Rut Depth (ARD) based aggregate thickness for 10,000 to 100,000 traffic count apart from simplifying the complex procedure of the GH approach for IRC SP 72-2015 data. The unique equation's result reveals an increase of 22.65% in aggregate thickness is attributed to the increase in ARD of 30mm using locally available poor aggregates. This confirms the practical relevance of ARD in pavement design that may help in planning maintenance programs and road rehabilitation strategies. The results obtained from the unique equation match 85 to 100% with GH results. Saving up to 36.5% to 76.9% of costly aggregate is found in the case of geotextile-reinforced gravel roads in Indian conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]