Pune Is Building a 173km Ring Road. Right Now, You're Driving Around a 40% Finished One.

In 2021, the Maharashtra government signed off on ₹26,831 crore for a road that would finally stop Pune from being a city with no way around itself: a 173km ring connecting 29 villages on the metropolitan region's edge, six lanes wide, with eight flyovers, four railway crossings, fourteen subways, seven viaducts and thirteen tunnels along the way. Five years later, PMRDA's own numbers put the project at roughly 40% complete — and that single figure hides a much messier reality underneath it.

Land acquisition, the thing that usually kills Indian infrastructure projects outright, is nearly done on the western stretch — close to 98% in some segments, with Phase 1 of that side already open to traffic. But swing over to the eastern side, around Kadambavasti, Wagholi and Vadachiwadi, and PMRDA has acquired only about 24% of the land it needs. That's not a rounding difference. That's two different projects moving at two different speeds, wearing the same name.

The timeline reflects it. The western loop is now targeted for late 2026 to mid-2027. The eastern loop — the half that would actually relieve pressure on Wagholi, Chandannagar and the roads feeding Pune-Ahmednagar traffic — isn't expected until May 2028. Eight toll plazas are already planned for whenever it does open, which tells you PMRDA is confident enough in eventual completion to be thinking about who pays for the upkeep.

What this means if you live anywhere near it

If your commute crosses one of the still-under-construction segments, you already know what "40% complete" feels like on the ground: narrowed carriageways, diversions that change month to month, and stretches where the "ring road" is a construction site with traffic squeezed along its edge. That's the cost of the next 18 to 30 months for a lot of people living in the villages this road is supposed to eventually serve.

The irony is that the ring road's whole purpose — making it easy to move between Pune's outer towns without funneling through the city center — is exactly the problem carpooling already solves today, years before any tolled lane opens. Someone commuting between Wagholi and Chakan, or Talegaon and Hinjewadi, doesn't need to wait for 2028. They need one more seat filled in a car that's already making that drive. A ring road changes the infrastructure. Carpooling changes who's using it, starting now.

And for the stretch where land acquisition is stuck at 24%, that's not a two-year problem — construction delays of this kind in Pune have historically run longer, not shorter (ask anyone who's watched the Baner-Pashan Link Road since 1992). Shared rides across that corridor aren't a stopgap until the road arrives. For a meaningful chunk of commuters, they may end up being the actual solution for most of the decade.