Mohammadwadi's Residents Warned This Was Coming. Then a 20-Year-Old Died Outside His Own Housing Society.

On September 21, 2026, Ibrahim Sarkar, 20, was killed in an accident outside Raheja Vista Premier Society in Mohammadwadi. Eight days later, residents of Undri, Pisoli, Mohammadwadi, Yeolewadi and Kondhwa submitted a formal representation to Pune's Police Commissioner, Amitesh Kumar, naming that accident directly and asking for urgent road-safety measures across the belt. It wasn't the first time this group had gone to the authorities that month — four days earlier, on September 25, a wider set of residents' associations had already filed a nine-point list of civic demands covering roads, footpaths, drainage, streetlights and water supply for the same cluster of neighbourhoods.

This is a part of Pune that's grown fast without the infrastructure to match. NIBM Road itself is barely 3km long, feeding into Kondhwa Road and onward to the Katraj-Hadapsar bypass — narrow, increasingly residential, and carrying far more daily traffic than that length suggests, including heavy vehicles that residents have specifically flagged as dangerous on roads with no real shoulder and, in many stretches, no footpath at all. The area has become a schooling hub too, which means some of the people walking those same shoulder-less roads every day are children.

A problem that's been on the record for months

This September wasn't a one-off flashpoint. Residents of NIBM Annexe filed a formal complaint in July after a PMC water-department contractor dug up the same stretch of road around SM Ghule Circle for the fifth time, leaving it in worse condition than before. In early July, hundreds turned out to protest a proposed PMC tanker-filling station near Raheja Reserve and Raheja Vista — the same society complex named in September's fatal accident. In August, a blocked drainage chamber near Golden Bakery overflowed onto the road for over a week before anyone from PMC addressed it. Read in sequence, the September 25 civic petition and the September 29 police petition don't look like a new complaint — they look like the same complaint, finally said loudly enough after someone died.

Public transport access here is thin by Pune standards: the nearest metro station is Swargate, roughly a 14-minute walk away, and the area leans on bus routes 170, 181 and 19 to cover the rest. For a resident population that's grown well ahead of PMC's road and footpath work, that leaves private vehicles — cars, two-wheelers, autos — doing most of the actual moving, on roads that were never widened to carry that load.

None of this is solved by one app. But every seat filled in a shared car on NIBM Road, Kondhwa Road or the stretch past Raheja Vista is one fewer vehicle adding to exactly the traffic density residents have been naming in their own complaints for months — on roads with no footpath, carrying a vehicle mix that's already outgrown them. It won't fix the civic list PMC has been sitting on. It's one of the few things that can start making those same roads measurably less crowded without waiting for anyone's approval.