Pune Approved This Road in 1992. It's Still Not Finished.

In 1992, Pune's IT boom hadn't happened yet. Hinjewadi was farmland. Baner was a village on the edge of the city, not a pin code full of glass office buildings. That's the year the Baner-Pashan Link Road first got approved - a fairly short connector meant to give Baner, Balewadi, and Pashan a direct route between each other instead of funneling everyone onto the same two or three main roads.

Construction didn't actually start until 2014. Twenty-two years between approval and the first shovel, mostly lost to land acquisition disputes, which is the single most common reason a Pune road project stalls for a decade instead of taking two years. And even after 2014, it wasn't smooth - one specific 200-metre stretch stayed unbuilt long after the rest of the road was usable, exactly the kind of thing where 95% done means 0% useful, because a road that stops for 200 metres isn't a shortcut, it's a dead end with extra steps. Civic officials are only now appointing a contractor to close that last gap, more than three decades after the project was first cleared.

This isn't an isolated case

A few kilometres away, the Aundh road-widening project has the same shape: a long-pending bottleneck near Aundh Body Gate Police Chowk, affecting the exact route commuters take toward Bremen Chowk and the Rajiv Gandhi Bridge, only now actually getting its site inspection and construction start after years of being talked about. Pune's civic body has a formal list of 33 of these 'missing link' roads across the city, with a stated target of finishing 21 of them this year and all 33 within two years - officials estimate that alone could cut close to a quarter of the city's overall traffic congestion once done. That's a real, credible number if it holds, and also a tacit admission of how much of Pune's daily traffic problem is just... unfinished roads, sitting on a list for years.

What this means if you commute through here

If your daily route touches Baner, Pashan, Balewadi, or Aundh, you've been living with a half-built road network for your entire time in Pune, not a temporary construction inconvenience. That changes the calculus on how to handle it. A missing link that's 'almost done' has been almost done before - sometimes for years - so it's not something to just wait out.

The practical response other stretches of Pune have already landed on applies here too: share the ride with someone doing the same Baner-Aundh-Pashan loop at the same time, because splitting the pain of a bottleneck between three people in one car is a better deal than three separate cars all sitting in it individually, regardless of when the 200-metre gap finally closes.