Mumbai: Photographs of cratered roads, angry posts tagging civic bodies, and questions over who is responsible for maintaining the busy stretch near the Dahisar Check Naka in Mumbai’s northwest suburbs have flooded social media since a 14-year-old schoolboy was killed there on Monday.
But local police told ThePrint that CCTV footage tells a different story.
Saurabh Vishwakarma was returning home from school with his father on Monday afternoon when a cement mixer truck struck their motorcycle near Penkarpada junction, close to the Dahisar toll naka. The accident occurred near Godavari lodge.
The accident threw the father and son onto the road, and Saurabh came under the truck’s rear wheel, suffering fatal injuries. His father was also injured and taken to hospital.
As images of the battered road circulated after Saurabh’s death, users on social media started linking the accident to the potholes on the stretch. Police, however, said their investigation has ruled out potholes as the immediate cause of the crash.
On condition of anonymity, an officer at the Kashimira Traffic Division told ThePrint that investigators initially examined whether the motorcycle had skidded because of a pothole. “CCTV footage revealed that the two-wheeler was travelling along the left side of the cement mixer when the truck struck it,” the officer said.
Saurabh, who was riding pillion, then fell beneath its wheel, he added.
Kashimira police have detained the 43-year-old truck driver, Sunil Rajbhar, and registered a case against him. The investigation is underway.
Although the CCTV recording appears to have settled the immediate question of what caused Monday’s crash, it has not settled the larger controversy around the road where it occurred.
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Road complaints
On Tuesday, citizen forum Gems of Mira Bhayandar posted photographs and a video of the road near Dahisar toll plaza, alleging that the stretch had been newly mastic-laid by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) through contractor Nirmal BuildInfra after the civic elections in January this year.
The group said potholes began appearing with the first monsoon rains and alleged that the road had progressively deteriorated for around 45 days without a permanent repair. It tagged NHAI and Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, questioning why action had not been taken against the contractor.
The highway has continued to require remedial work.
In November 2025, NHAI project manager Suhas Chitnis told Loksatta that the contractor had been instructed to repair the highway and that micro-surfacing would be used to address the damaged stretches. Separately, on 30 October 2025, NHAI had floated a ₹156.23-crore tender for additional safety measures along the 121-km Achhad-Dahisar stretch of NH-48.
NHAI’s official project list shows that Nirmal BuildInfra Pvt Ltd was awarded the ₹553-crore contract on 18 August 2023 to carry out white-topping and safety work along the 121-km Achhad-Dahisar stretch of NH-48.
At Dahisar Check Naka, however, fixing a pothole has long been complicated by another problem – determining which agency is responsible for maintaining the road. The Maharashtra government transferred maintenance of the Western Express Highway to the BMC in November 2022, according to a report by ThePrint.
But around the Mumbai-Mira Bhayandar boundary, stretches of the highway and service roads have repeatedly become caught in a tussle involving the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), Mira-Bhayandar Municipal Corporation (MBMC), Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).
(Edited by Maryam Hassan)