Mumbai: All these years, Mumbai seemed to be Maharashtra’s favoured child.
The financial capital got most of the state’s mega transport infrastructure projects, from the Atal Setu Sea Link to the coastal road.
Now, Pune is also getting some attention. The rapidly growing city’s long-delayed Ring Road, a showpiece road infrastructure project proposed 17 years ago to ease traffic congestion, is finally ready to get off the drawing board.
However, the high-speed corridor’s delay has come at a tall price with the project’s estimated cost more than doubling over the years to Rs 42,000 crore from Rs 20,000 crore.
The Eknath Shinde-led cabinet approved this escalation on 4 October and authorities say the tendering process for all nine packages of the project’s outer ring road has been completed. Construction of the outer ring road is likely to start by the end of the year.
The 264-km Pune Ring Road will have two parts: an inner ring road and an outer ring road. The inner ring road will go through the city while the outer ring road will be like a bypass for Pune city.
The project is divided between two government agencies. The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) will take care of the outer segment, while the Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA) will look after the inner segment
The project was first proposed by the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government led by Vilasrao Deshmukh in 2007 but was inordinately delayed as it was stuck on the drawing board.
A source from the then Congress-NCP government told ThePrint that it took some time to finalise the design and actual work began much later.
It was only eight years later in 2015—when an alliance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the undivided Shiv Sena was in power—that the state government gave formal approval to the MSRDC to prepare a detailed plan.
“Although the first concept of this project began in 2015, the real work started somewhere in 2017. And we can’t really call it a delay but during such projects, there is a process,” a senior MSRDC official told ThePrint.
“After the concept is ready, the traffic survey is done and its financial feasibility is checked. Then environmental and forest clearance is required; land acquisition was needed,” the official said.
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Why Pune needs a ring road
Pune was once known as a city for retirees but has now grown into a major industrial and IT hub in Maharashtra.
While it slowly expanded and urbanised during British colonial rule with the establishment of a civic body and Army cantonments, its growth was most exponential in the post-Independence period.
The population of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, a town in the Pune urban area, doubled to about 50 lakh in 2011 from 25 lakh in 1991.
As the population grew, the first regional plan for this area of 1,340 sq km, for the period between 1970 and 1991, came into force in May 1976.
A new regional plan was drafted and put in place in 1997 for the entire Pune district. It made several recommendations for transportation and housing, including 13 new inner-ring towns and 14 outer-ring towns, to ensure Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad were not overburdened as the population surged.
“It is not just for Pune, but for any city—as the city grows, an outer ring road or a bypass becomes necessary to avoid congestion of traffic,” said a Pune urban planner, Vijay Sane.
“For Pune, there had to be a solid political will, too, to make this ring road faster. And not just political; in a democracy, bureaucracy, people’s will and policies and politics all go hand in hand,” he added.
Mumbai’s transport infrastructure has already got a makeover.
The city’s Eastern Freeway, Sewri-Nhava Sheba Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (Atal Setu), the coastal freeway from Marine Drive to Worli, the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, and a host of other projects in the pipeline will create a ring route around the city, allowing commuters to enter and exit parts of the city without wading into its traffic.
The other projects that will complete this garland include the Virar-Alibaug Multimodal corridor, which will meet Atal Setu, a tunnel from Orange Gate where the freeway currently ends to the beginning of the coastal road on Marine Drive, and sea links from Bandra to Versova, and Versova to Virar.
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The delays
The 136-km outer ring road will help relieve congestion in Pune by redirecting heavy vehicles and improving connectivity with inter-district highways.
The 128.08-km inner ring road is expected to divert heavy vehicular traffic and reduce traffic congestion in Pune city.
The ambitious Ring Road project’s outer segment will be divided into nine packages – five on the western section and four on the eastern.
The western ring road will connect towns like Mulshi, Singhgad, Panshet, Khadkwasala and come to Khed-Shivapur. The eastern ring road will have connectivity to towns like Nashik, Ahmednagar, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Solapur and meet at Khed-Shivapur.
However, the Ring Road project has seen its fair share of delays.
The initial Ring Road concept came up in 2007 during Vilasrao Deshmukh’s time, but the project only kicked off later in 2017.
In between, designers were working on the design as well as finding an appropriate route and land because the land cost was a big factor, said a senior leader from the then Congress-NCP government.
“We had to shift the alignment of the road depending on the availability of cheaper land. Plus, there was an issue related to defence land in Pune, which had to be avoided,” said the leader.
“Sometimes, if the longer route was designed, the cost was getting escalated, but for cheaper land costs, the land was not available on that route. So the route design kept on changing initially.”
The MSRDC official quoted above agreed.
When the project design was finally approved, land acquisition was a major challenge. The entire process of land acquisition is still not complete.
The actual land acquisition began much later in 2021 under the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government. A separate Rs 5,500 crore was allocated for the land acquisition, over and above the estimated project cost Housing and Urban Development Corp (HUDCO) had given to the state government.
According to the MSRDC official, at least 94 percent of the land for the western part of the project has been acquired, while the eastern part is lagging at 75 percent.
The MSRDC hopes it will be able to acquire the entire land parcel and start construction of the road soon.
“There was resistance amongst landowners. We had to convince them hard to give up their land. For that, a TDR (Transferable Development Rights) was also proposed twice. Besides, there were issues with funds flowing between the state and the Centre for the project, which also delayed the land acquisition,” the senior official quoted above said.
“During this process, multiple governments changed and so did some of the officers. This contributed to further delays,” the officer added.
The delays also pushed up the costs.
According to a cabinet press note, the total cost of the approximately 70-km eastern section of the outer ring road jumped to Rs 19,932.98 crore from around Rs 10,000 crore in September 2021. Similarly, the cost of the western portion of the outer ring road shot up to Rs 22,778.05 crore from an earlier estimate of Rs 12,000 crore.
Now that the project has got the government’s nod, officials hope it will be wrapped up by December 2027. The MSRDC hopes the high-speed corridor will improve connectivity and reduce commute time in a big way.
For instance, it will almost halve the travel time from Solapur to the new Navi Mumbai airport to four to five hours from about 10 hours earlier, the official said. Similarly, people from Satara, Kolhapur and other western Maharashtra will also be able to travel seamlessly.
“This will be the industrial plus agricultural growth centre because of this road,” the official said.
However, Sane decried the delayed execution of the project.
“Eventually all projects happen, but if they don’t happen within the stipulated time frame, what’s the use?” Sane said.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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