PMC Says the Riverfront Is Basically Done. The Trees It Needed to Cut Are Still Being Argued Over.

In October, the Pune Municipal Corporation told reporters that major works under the Mula-Mutha Riverfront Development Project were complete. Citizens living near some of the finished stretches had a more specific complaint: they still don't have a proper road to get there.

That gap - a landscaped riverbank with no clean way in - is a small version of the bigger contradiction running through this project. PMC is simultaneously finishing things and still fighting, in a public hearing room, over whether it's allowed to cut down the trees the next stretch needs.

What's actually built

The numbers on paper are large. The full project covers roughly 44 kilometres of riverbank - 22.2 km along the Mula, 10.4 km along the Mutha, and 11.8 km where they meet - carrying an estimated cost of ₹4,727 crore. By January 2026, PMC had reported close to 90% of the first phase complete, with a roughly 5-kilometre stretch between Sangamwadi and Kalyani Nagar targeted to finish by the end of March. In mid-May, the Maharashtra Cabinet cleared the transfer of about 52,851 square metres of government land to PMC at no cost, covering the ground between Sangamwadi Bridge and Bund Garden Bridge - one of seven stretches identified under the plan. In August, PMC's standing committee approved work on Stretch 6. The project also needs an additional ₹17.3 crore for land acquisition, which officials say should clear a pending hurdle once it comes through.

What's still being fought over

None of that progress has settled the argument over the trees. On 26 May, PMC held a public hearing - residents, environmentalists, and local activists packed in for more than four hours - over a proposal to fell 163 trees and transplant others along the Mula riverbank in Balewadi. It did not go smoothly. Several attendees challenged whether the hearing was even legally valid, pointing to what they called procedural lapses and inadequate public notice. A month later, BJP Rajya Sabha MP Medha Kulkarni toured several of the river sites herself and said publicly that the riverfront could be built without cutting the trees at all.

No result of that 163-tree proposal has been reported since - not an approval, not a rejection, not a revised number. It's sitting exactly where the May hearing left it, while bulldozers keep working on the stretches that were already cleared.

This isn't a new argument for this particular project. Citizens and the Tree Authority have been going back and forth over Mula-Mutha tree-felling since at least 2023, with activists arguing the whole 44-km plan needed environmental clearance it never got. What's new is the scale: this is the first time a specific, named number - 163 trees, one named neighbourhood, one dated hearing - has had a real paper trail attached to it, instead of a general objection to "the project."

The part that affects a commute

Riverfront construction doesn't stay inside its own footprint. A kilometre of riverbank under active work usually means a kilometre of access road narrowed, diverted, or closed outright for months at a stretch - and Balewadi, Aundh, Sangamwadi, and Kalyani Nagar are all dense residential pockets, not open land. Every stretch PMC finishes "ahead of schedule" is also a stretch that was recently torn up.

That's the kind of disruption that makes a predictable carpool - someone who already knows this week's detour, going the same direction at the same time every day - genuinely more useful than it sounds on a normal commute. You're not just splitting a fare; you're splitting the cost of figuring out which road is actually open this week. Pune's riverfront will eventually be finished. Until then, somebody still has to get past it.

Cover photo: Riverfront development project as seen from Fitzgerald Bridge, Pune, by DesiBoy101 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.