Pimpri-Chinchwad Is Paying ₹170 Crore to Beautify a Road It's Simultaneously Digging Up

If you commute along the old Mumbai-Pune Highway between Dapodi and Nigdi right now, here's what that actually looks like: a water pipeline being laid underground along the same route your bus, or your BRT corridor, runs on, adding to the congestion that corridor was supposed to have solved years ago.

The Dapodi-Nigdi stretch isn't new to big promises. It got a 12.5km grade separator roughly fifteen years back, and it hosted the first corridor of Pimpri-Chinchwad's BRT system - Corridor I, on the old NH-4 - when that launched in August 2018. On paper, this is a solved problem. On the ground, in 2026, it's three separate, overlapping projects at three different stages.

Project one: beautification, fifteen years late

PCMC has allocated ₹170 crore for footpaths, cycle tracks and general beautification along the Dapodi-Nigdi stretch - a facelift arriving about fifteen years after the grade separator itself went in. It's the kind of spend that tells you the civic body considers this corridor a priority. It doesn't tell you why the footpaths took fifteen years to catch up to the road.

Project two: more road capacity, already out to bid

Separately, PCMC has invited bids for a ₹109.38 crore Nigdi-Dapodi road corridor construction project - more lanes, more capacity, on top of the beautification spend above. Two different budgets, two different contractors, likely two different timelines, both targeting the same few kilometres.

Project three: an entirely new parallel road, not even tendered yet

And separately again, PCMC is planning a brand-new 2.5km road from Kasarwadi Bridge to Dapodi Bridge, running along the railway line on the opposite side from the existing highway, through the Phugewadi cemetery area, specifically to pull some traffic off the Dapodi-Nigdi corridor onto a second route. This one is the least advanced of the three: tendering can't even begin until PCMC appoints a design consultant. As of the latest reporting, that consultant hadn't been appointed yet.

Three projects, one commute

None of this is a complaint that PCMC isn't trying - if anything, it's the opposite problem. Beautification money, widening money, and a whole new parallel road are all moving at once, on the same corridor, on three unrelated clocks, while a pipeline crew digs through the middle of it today. If you're driving this stretch for work every morning, the honest advice isn't "wait for one of these to finish" - it's "share the trip while all three are still happening," because by the time they're done, so is a meaningful chunk of your commuting years.

Photo: DesiBoy101, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.