Three Names, Three Decades, One Bypass: Pune's Katraj-Dehu Road Is Still Being Fixed

Ask three different people what to call the elevated road that's supposed to fix Pune's western bypass, and you'll get three different answers. In 2021, when Nitin Gadkari's ministry first floated it, it was the "Dehu Road-Narhe elevated corridor." By December 2025, NHAI was being told to speed up a project described the same way. By July 18, 2026, at a foundation-laying ceremony with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Gadkari announced DPR approval for the "Ravet-Narhe elevated corridor" - same 32km stretch, same roughly ₹6,000 crore price tag, one endpoint quietly moved a few kilometres north.

That's not a typo repeated across multiple outlets. It's what four years of a highway project in motion actually looks like from the outside: the destination keeps being the same traffic jam, the name keeps drifting.

The bypass underneath all this

The road these elevated lanes are meant to relieve is the Katraj-Dehu Road bypass itself - the old NH48 route that carries Pune-Bengaluru highway traffic around, and increasingly through, the city's western edge. It opened as a two-lane road in 1994. It became four lanes in 2000. A six-lane widening was proposed back in 2010, and depending on which report you trust, some version of that widening is still technically in progress sixteen years later.

In September 2024, Gadkari approved a separate, smaller fix: ₹300 crore for traffic decongestion measures on the bypass itself, with NHAI, the Pune Municipal Corporation and Pune Police all told to coordinate - alongside a proposed peak-hour ban on heavy vehicles on the same stretch. That's the kind of stopgap that shows up when a bigger fix is still years away.

Where the big fix actually stands

The elevated corridor is the bigger fix. It's been "in the pipeline," in the ministry's own phrase via Swarajya's reporting, since around 2021. It got fast-tracked in August 2025. The Union government reportedly cleared it in September 2025. NHAI was told to speed up again in December 2025, with legal issues said to be close to resolution. Then came the July 2026 foundation-stone event - which is a DPR approval and a groundbreaking photo-op, not an open road. No source has yet confirmed an actual construction start date.

What that means if you drive this stretch today

If your commute crosses Katraj, Nanded City, Warje or anywhere along this corridor, none of that four-year, three-name saga has shortened your drive by a single minute yet. The ₹300 crore decongestion fix from 2024 and the ₹6,000 crore elevated corridor from 2026 are both still mostly on paper. The one thing that actually reduces the number of cars on this stretch today - carpooling with someone making the same crossing - doesn't need a DPR, a foundation stone, or a new name.

Photo: Wise Droid, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.