Pune: It’s one of the city’s most delayed infrastructure projects. For eight years now, PMC has been trying to widen the Katraj-Kondhwa Road, from its current width of 18-24 metres to a more uniform 50 metres. But the project has struggled to gain pace, with large portions of the route stuck in land-acquisition problems.For commuters, the under-construction route has become a hazard. Police data shows in the past five years, there have been more than 50 accidents and nearly 25 deaths within the 3.5-km stretch between the Rajas Society in Katraj and Pisoli near Khadi Machine Chowk in Kondhwa. Most of the casualties involved collisions between heavy vehicles and two-wheeler riders.The most recent death was on Tuesday, of 16-year-old Class X student Pratibha Naik, who fell off her father’s scooter when they were rear-ended by a truck near Kapilamrut Dairy. Her sister, Vaishnavi, was on the scooter too. Her legs were crushed under the truck.“Every time we go through that stretch, we are risking our lives,” says Dnyaneshwar Pawar, a resident of Gokulnagar. He has been seeing roadworks at the site since 2018, when they began.“Except for one year, when there was some progress, nothing has moved. The road’s still a mess. And our worries grow whenever we hear of another accident or death,” says Pawar.Chandrakant Zombade, who witnessed Tuesday’s accident, says the stretch where it happened — a very busy U-Turn — is a meeting point of traffic from all directions.“The road is always busy with heavy vehicles, and wrong-side driving is a major problem. This is one of the main reasons behind frequent accidents,” says Zombade, who owns a scrap shop.Traffic police have since installed signals and barricades at the spot to regulate the U-Turn and prevent vehicles coming from opposite directions from colliding. “But what’s the use of all of that when roadworks are still on? That poor girl’s life would’ve been saved if PMC had finished this project on time,” says Sumedha Singh, resident of a housing society that’s close to where Pratibha, her sister and father were struck by the truck.The 3.5-km narrow road connects Katraj with Kondhwa, and Fursungi on Pune-Saswad Road. It’s an important link between the Pune-Bengaluru and Pune-Solapur highways and is frequently used by heavy vehicles to bypass core areas of the city.Widening work is currently on along sections where PMC has acquired land. But this staggered progress has resulted in several missing links and long unusable sections, including an entire underpass near the Iskcon temple, which was finished over a year ago, but hasn’t been opened due to pending acquisition of adjoining land.Om Prakash Divate, additional municipal commissioner of PMC, admits acquisition had been the main hurdle. Some landowners, he says, are seeking monetary compensation while others are willing to hand over land in exchange for FSI or TDR.“After state govt’s approval, the issue has now been resolved, and funds have been sanctioned. Necessary allocations were made in both last year’s and this year’s budgets,” Divate says, adding that buildings and structures that were obstructing the road were demolished this year after land was acquired.There are now 10 land parcels where issues related to measurements and other technical matters are pending. “Discussions on the proposal to resolve these issues are in the final stages. We expect the issues to be sorted out soon,” Divate says, adding he expects the widening work to be completed by Feb or March next year.
