Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) consist of a collection of wireless mobile nodes which dynamically exchange data without the need of fixed infrastructure or a wired backbone network. On-demand routing protocols use a flood-based discovery mechanism to find routes when required. Since each route discovery incurs high overhead and latency, the frequency of route discoveries must be kept low for on-demand protocols to be effective. On-demand routing protocols can achieve better performance and scalability by computing multiple routes in a single route discovery. Multipath routing is one of the applied approaches in mobile ad hoc networks to address their limited bandwidth and high route breakage rate. This paper proposed a novel approach called multipath on-demand routing (MPODRT), which reduces the routing overhead by using secondary paths by computing fail-safe multiple routes. © Research India Publications.