Pune Cantonment Board Just Raised Parking Fees. Its Own Parking Garage Has Been "Coming Soon" Since 2018.

Try parking a car in Camp these days and the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) will charge you more for the privilege than it did a year ago. The May 2026 pay-and-park rate hike across PCB's jurisdiction - Camp, MG Road, and the surrounding commercial lanes - drew enough backlash that local coverage called it "monetised audacity." Fair or not, that's the mood among the shopkeepers and shoppers who've relied on roadside parking in this stretch for decades.

What the higher fees aren't funding, at least not visibly, is more parking.

A structure that's been "underway" for eight years

PCB approved a multi-level parking facility back in 2018. As of an April 2026 report, it's still not built. The civic board has formally asked its contractor, Relcon Infra Projects Ltd, to explain the delay - and says the company hasn't responded to several notices. Sources differ on the exact site, with one report naming a location near Hotel Lucky and another citing Coyaji Road, which on its own tells you something about how little visible progress there's actually been to pin down.

Eight years is long enough for an entire generation of Camp-area shopkeepers to have given up expecting it and started treating curbside parking - now pricier than before - as the only real option.

PMC has its own version of this, just outside the fence

Step across PCB's boundary and the Pune Municipal Corporation has been rolling out its own paid-parking trial on commercial roads like FC Road and JM Road, part of a wider plan to manage parking across 45-plus roads citywide. Two separate civic authorities, two separate parking squeezes, one shared commercial district that straddles both of their lines on a map.

The actual fix is needing fewer spots, not finding more

A stalled parking garage and a newly expensive curb have the same practical effect: if you're driving into Camp, you're now paying more to park somewhere that was already hard to park in. The math changes if fewer people are driving in solo in the first place. A group heading to Camp for the same errand - a wedding-shopping trip down MG Road, a weekend at the Camp food stalls - splitting one car and one parking fee instead of three cars circling for three spots isn't a long-term fix for PCB's eight-year-old construction delay. It's just the one lever an ordinary Punekar actually has control over this year.

Photo: Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.