Wakad Got Three New Underpasses on Paper in June. The Bridge Everyone Actually Complains About Isn't One of Them

Ask anyone who drives into Hinjawadi from Wakad which single stretch of road they'd fix first, and most point to the same place: Wakad Bridge. Not the service roads leading up to it, not the chowk on either side - the bridge deck itself.

Traffic officials who've studied the spot describe the actual defect in plain terms: the roads feeding the bridge are wider than the bridge is. Three or four lanes' worth of vehicles funnel down to a narrower deck, and because Hinjawadi's IT parks pull traffic almost entirely in one direction at a time - inbound every morning, outbound every evening - that funnel gets hit by the same directional surge twice a day, every working day.

What actually got approved in June

On June 1, 2026, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari signed off on three new box-structure underpasses along NH-48 in Pimpri-Chinchwad, after a review meeting on pending highway projects in Pune. The sites: Punawale, Tathawade and Wakad. Gadkari also directed officials to fast-track long-pending service road work in the same three localities and widen the existing underpasses at Tathawade and Punawale. Tendering reportedly began soon after, with the project pegged at roughly ₹70-80 crore.

It's real money and a real minister's signature, and commuters in Punawale and Tathawade should feel it eventually. But read the geography carefully: these are underpasses along the corridor, built to let local cross-traffic get under the highway without signal delays. Not one of them is the Wakad Bridge structure itself, and none of this year's approvals touch its core problem - a bridge deck that's simply narrower than the traffic arriving at it.

The fix that actually targets the bridge is a much slower story

The project that does name Wakad Bridge directly is bigger and older: an 8.6-kilometre elevated corridor running from Kiwale to Balewadi Stadium, first reported in detail back in August 2025. Its plan includes a four-lane elevated road, a four-lane surface road beneath it, expanded bridges over the Mula and Mutha rivers, and - specifically - a two-level flyover at Wakad's Bhumkar Chowk.

At the time that plan surfaced, officials said roughly 85% of the farmers along the route had already handed over land, with compensation and encroachment clearance still working through the rest. That was fourteen months ago. No public construction-start date has surfaced since. Land acquisition running ahead of actual groundbreaking is a familiar shape for anyone who's followed Pune's bigger road projects - it's the same pattern the Baner-Pashan Link Road sat in for over two decades.

And underneath both of these, there's a third promise still unresolved: the Pune Metro Pink Line's Wakad Chowk station, meant to pull a meaningful slice of this traffic onto rail instead of the bridge. It was supposed to be running by mid-2026. As of early October, it's still waiting on a passenger-service go-ahead from above PMRDA's own authority.

Three fixes, three different clocks

So the honest state of things: new underpasses are funded and tendered, mostly for the stretch around the bridge, not the bridge itself. The elevated corridor that would actually relieve Wakad Bridge has land but no visible construction start. And the metro line that would take pressure off the road entirely is built but not yet switched on. None of them are fake. All of them are real, named, dated projects. They're just not solving the same problem on the same timeline.

In the meantime, this stretch carries thousands of people a day making the identical trip - Punawale, Tathawade, Wakad, into Hinjawadi's IT parks, and back out again every evening. That's about as clean a carpooling case as Pune traffic produces: the same origin-destination pattern, repeated by thousands of people, every single working day, funneling through one narrow deck that three separate infrastructure projects are all promising to eventually fix. Sharing that commute with even one colleague headed the same way doesn't wait for any of the three.