Pune Inaugurated the Kharadi-Keshavnagar Bridge in August. Residents Had Already Let Themselves In.

Before Union Minister of State Murlidhar Mohol cut the ribbon on the Kharadi-Keshavnagar bridge on August 16, some residents had already removed the barricades and started driving across it themselves. That's not a metaphor for impatience with Pune infrastructure in general — it happened, on video, in the days before the official opening, after nearly a decade of waiting for a bridge the Mundhwa Residents Forum says authorities were vague about even as the opening date approached.

Ten years, 246 metres, one Sunday

The bridge itself — 246.40 metres long, 24 metres wide, crossing the Mula-Mutha river with separate service roads and footpaths — had been a near-decade-long project by the time PMC Commissioner Naval Kishore Ram set August 15 as the hard opening date. The inauguration slipped one day, to Sunday the 16th, but it happened: the structure meant to decongest the routes linking Kharadi, Mundhwa, Keshavnagar, Magarpatta, Hadapsar, Wagholi, and Vadgaon Sheri was, on paper, finally open.

What "open" didn't include

A 700-metre stretch of approach road on the Keshavnagar side was still unfinished at the time of inauguration, and PMC said some of that work would continue after traffic started using the bridge. More notably, a separate but connected piece of infrastructure — the Keshavnagar-Amanora underpass — remained shut, with no confirmed reopening timeline as of the most recent reporting. For residents, that meant a bridge that technically counted as "open" while a key piece of how you'd actually get to and from it stayed closed.

No confirmed update since

GoVia couldn't find reporting from after late August on whether the approach road finished on schedule or the underpass reopened — which is itself the honest state of this story as of today. A bridge that took most of a decade to build, opened with a minister's ribbon-cutting, and still had residents uncertain two weeks later whether the full route was actually usable isn't unusual for Pune infrastructure, but it's worth knowing before you plan a route around it.

The gap this leaves, right now

If your commute crosses this corridor — Kharadi to Magarpatta, Keshavnagar to Hadapsar, any combination of the neighbourhoods this bridge is meant to connect — the honest planning assumption is still "partially usable, with at least one known gap," not "problem solved." That's precisely the kind of in-between period, infrastructure half-delivered, where sharing the ride with someone navigating the same half-finished route beats finding out the hard way, alone, that the underpass you were counting on is still shut.