India is in the midst of a tremendous expansion of both its airfield and roadway pavement infrastructure. Necessarily, the focus in this expansion is to deliver the facilities that will meet the needs of both the public and private sectors in an economical manner over the expected design life. Initially, the primary needs revolve around capacity, access, and safety. Over time, however, in addition to those needs it is important to consider reliability, maintainability, and sustainability, as these are keys to ensuring that India's growing infrastructure can serve its intended purpose in the long run. Many projects focus on design and construction, with little consideration given to the operation of the pavement. This can lead to a cycle in which pavements are constructed, put into service, allowed to deteriorate until they reach a highly distressed condition, and then are rehabilitated or even reconstructed, all at great cost. Not only is this economically unviable, it specifically fails to meet needs associated with safety, reliability, maintainability, and sustainability. Pavement preservation represents a recent paradigm shift in the approach being used to manage pavement networks. A key component of pavement preservation is preventive maintenance, which is briefly summarized as the practice of keeping good pavements in good condition without increasing their structural capacity. The overall practice of pavement preservation involves actively managing pavements early in their life cycle. This practice provides tangible benefits, including improved safety, rideability, reliability, lower operating costs, and less disruption to the traveling public. This paper identifies the key elements of a pavement preservation program, both for airfield and roadway pavements. It discusses the benefits of pavement preservation to the owner agency and pavement users. It also identifies the necessary components of a successful preservation program and the steps that should be taken to integrate pavement preservation into the operating agencies overall pavement management practices. These steps include the establishment of operating goals and performance measures for pavement networks, identification of the preservation strategies that will help to achieve those goals, development of guidelines for the use of those strategies, and the use of measurement and monitoring to track progress. It also identifies other best practices of agencies that have successfully initiated the paradigm shift toward pavement preservation. This paper is based on the authors' experience with preventive maintenance practices in state highway agencies in the United States, as well as observations of both roadway and pavement networks in India (such as at Bengaluru International Airport) and elsewhere. 

Keywords: Pavement preservation, rideability, reliability