Talk On The Walk

Around November 2005 condition of roads all over Pune was pretty bad and the then municipal commissioner was facing criticism from everywhere. Work on a small stretch of the Pashan-Baner Link road was taken up at this time and was done so well that it would rival the Baner road or Sus road of today. This was the time when a prominent newspaper roared "Ithey kay dhavpattya banavun viman utarvanaar ka ?" (Is a runway being constructed here for landing airplanes ?).

Work was promptly stopped. This part of the road is seen on the far end in this photo below. The road ahead of this part until Sus Road and before this part till Baner road remained in very poor condition for the next couple of years.

Since the Pashan-Baner link road did not connect these two areas, hardly anyone from Sus road area know about this road or took the road to reach Baner, so workers from adjoining brick kilns would play cricket here at leisure:


Gold Coast was almost complete but the crown was still under construction as seen in photo above.

A view of the PB link road taken from atop the Gold Coast building is shown below. This is a low resolution photo.

On the extreme left is MontVert Finesse, then Spring & Blossom, then Echelon, then the PB link road is seen. On the right of the road is Nano Space IT park, then Rolling Hills and on the extreme right side is a building that I don't know.


This one below is a panoramic view that shows Whispering Wind too.

Kubera Bahar, Athashree, OJAS, Kumar Sahwas, Meadows Avenue are also seen. Crystal Garden had not come up yet and Echelon and Nano Space were under construction. While Magnolia, MontVert Biarritz were still being advertised, the dense green belt between Whispering Wind and Ramnadi looked very attractive.

Coming back onto the road, back in mid 2007, the PB link road had tonnes of rada-roda dumped on the stretch along Ramnadi and just one of these is as seen in photo below. There were many such humps upto Baner road and riding on a bike would give a Camel-On-Stereoids-Ride... very enjoyable. Note the two trees and the two MSEB poles on the right side.

This road seen in photo above eventually lead to Felicita and they ripped apart the rubble heaps on the right side and made a much more motorable road around Oct-Nov 2007. Construction of Symantec was still underway. Note again the two trees and the MSEB poles.


This is the view from the other direction and there was only a right turn towards the mountain. Only loose gravel was lying on this stretch for a couple of months which is so typical of PMC.


Between this stretch of the Pashan-Baner Link road and the fencing wall flows the Ramnadi. At the far end, the road takes an almost U-turn in the direction of the hills.

Though the P-B link road was motorable by now, the photo below shows the dismal state of the turn. To the right is Baner road and the left one goes in the direction of the hills.


They started improving the quality from the Baner road side but the road itself was still narrow. The heap of rubble on the right side as seen in pic below is a tarred road now.


At the far end where the P-B link road touched Baner road, work was again pending for may months until the two opening in the channels were closed. The one on the left circled red was large enough that a bike or a nano could easily vanish into it.


To the right of this junction was the old narrow bridge over Ramnadi that existed until Oct 2008. Widenening of the bridge began hastily in Sept 2008 for the Commonwealth Youth Games and a new bridge came up between the pipes on the near side and the yellow pmc dustbin on the other side as seen in this early morning photo below:

Photo below shows the piles for the new bridge under construction.

The haphazard and unplanned work resulted into something that only PMC and JNNURM could possibly achieve together, a funny looking tri-bridge that existed only for about 3 weeks after its construction.


As the bridge was widened, it was apparently broken into three segregated parts, all separated by bars. So, while the lanes on either side were used for vehicles coming from Baner and from the Pune Univ chowk, the lane in the centre was a site of perpetual confusion.

No board existed to indicate who should use the narrow middle lane. As a result, there were occasions when vehicles coming from both directions almost collided. Moreover, the centre lane had a curved slope as seen in photo above which caught motorists unaware. Later this middle part of the bridge was broken up to finally create the bridge over Ramnadi in its current state.

This image is not photoshopped. It appears to be the most colorful spot on the Baner road naturally, as seen from left to right are the pink wall of Symantec, green glass of Symantec again, the violet and magenta hoardings, deep blue color on the divider on the bridge, prominent black & white stripes on the bridge again and the deep red patches of Purple-Pride Accord building on the right.