Link Road Tender

The floating of tender for the 36M DP road outside Whispering Wind is both a good news and bad. If pmc has its way, its going to be a nightmare for residents of buildings directly on this road. pmc contractors are notorious for delaying road projects. News and photos of work on Baner rd, Karve rd, Paud rd, etc. appearing in various newspapers over the past one year sends a chill down the spine when one recalls the horrific condition of roads under construction and post-comlpetion.

Telephone cables are disrupted, exits and entrance to buildings becomes a problem due to changes in levels of internal and the road being constructed.
The alarm bell for Whispering Wind is its being on the downstream side of the road which invites rainwater, dust, dirt, etc, from the elevated road inside the building premises.

The proposed total duration for this project is 12 months and upon comlpetion this road would be wider than Baner road which is 30M. The road should appear a bit like the Sus road between balaji mandir chowk to sai chowk.

Part of the tender that appeared in 'Sakaal' dt. 23-July-2009 is below:

(click for larger view)

The tender describes the DP road as 36M DP road between 'Pashan Sus rd' and 'the boundary between Pashan and Baner' which is the road near Rolling Hills.

Part of Baner DP map downloaded from pmc website is shown below. This map shows the Pashan-Baner link road as the boundary between Pashan and Baner.

So the road for which tender is floated seems to be the one marked in green below.

The tender will be opened on 7-Aug-2009 and since this will be done using money take from our pockets, following are our tasks as alert citizens:

• Keep close eye on which company is assigned the contract.

• Check the past expertise and past experience of this company in the area of road development.

• Check the credentials and past performance of the company.

• Check if this company was black listed for non-performance, etc. PMC is known to have assigned projects to such companies in the recent past.

• Keep continuous touch with supervising pmc officials and seek updates on the progress of the project.

• Work with company and pmc officials to ensure that road work does not cause any inconvenience to residents for commuting in and out of Whispering Wind.

• Intervene and demand for proper foothpath, road-divider, speed breakers, plantation, cycle-track and storm water pipeline.

But, given the perpetual apathy and ignorance of WW residents this seems only a pipe-dream, with no pun intended ;-)

Whispering Wind Plaque

This concrete plaque stands outside Whispering Wind across the road and erected in 1972 is the oldest man-made object in the entire Pashan-Baner link road area.



A closer view reveals the wear-out paint that reads 'Sushant Saha Gruha Rachana Sanstha', ' Pashan Pune', 'Survey no 35'. Below that is perhaps the date 19 January and the year is not seen. But Mr. Sudhir Kolhatkar knows it is 1972 since he is one of the original members of this housing society which has a turbulent history since its inception 37 years back until Whispering Wind was built.

In year 2003, the concrete board is seen at the far end in photo below, ahead of the large Whispering Wind hoarding and just to the left of the auto-rickshaw with a white hood.

(click photo to view larger)

Panning to the right from here still standing on first floor of B-bldg, one has a romantic view of the hills with only MontVert Finesse Bldg-A complete and Bldg-C under construction.

The heap of bricks are not meant for construction at WW. Its one of the many brick kilns in the neighbourhood. No doubt atleast half a dozen corporators from the Pashan-Baner belt have a history of either owners of and some even workers at these brick kilns.

(click photo to view larger)

This is a partial view of the original play-area planned by builder and as shown in the brochure given to customers of Whispering Wind.

(click photo to view larger)

Here is the view of B-bldg under construction from where the photos were taken:

This is the view of A-bldg with the sample flat on 1st floor ready.

This is a photo of the central sitout area with the water-treatment plant just in place. Disregard by residents has left this facility unused till date.

This photo below is dated mid-august 2004 and the most striking feature herein is the absence of the joint between C- and B-bldgs which is shown in my previous post.

C-building is also complete now and the play-area has all vanished and work on the new club-house is seen underway. The pit with rainwater accumulated is perhaps the location of the swimming pool or may be just the trench for the wall foundation.

Finally, this is a distant view that shows consrtuction of D-bldg just started.

City Pride in Pashan

Pune Pratibimb is a suppliment for the Marathi daily 'Sakal'. I read about the pmc budget on their blog at http://punepratibimb.blogspot.com/2007/08/blog-post_03.html

I got curious about the proposed garden in survey 140/6 and started looking for this at http://www.wikimapia.org/ which is a website built on google maps and allows marking areas along with comments.

This would be an exciting development if materialzes in the near future. The location map is as below. When coming from Cosmos bank, do not turn left on Sus road after crossing the bridge but move straight further on the narrow road along the Ramnadi. Here State Bank nagar, Nikash Lawns, etc. are on the left and the site is to the right as shown in green in map below.

The area marked in magenta is proposed site for the City Pride Multiplex and Mall. search for 'Balaji Mandir Pashan' at wikimapia.org and single click the 'Garden Reservation' area to popup the comments dialog. Scroll to read the information about both the garden and the multiplex.

The survey number got me curious so I looked at a 1978 site plan of Whispering Wind (originally Sushant Coop Hsg. Society) which Mr. Sudhir Kolhatkar generously shared with me.

I scanned and enhanced the same in photoshop and it looks like below. The site plan interested me for the direct road from the bridge over Ramnadi going to Baner. Whispering Wind was bang on this road. Right-click the image below and save, then open in a viewer to see the fine text, especially the year in the lower side.

(Right-click to save your copy)

Then I superimposed this 1978 site plan over a google maps view of the area:

(right-click the image above and save)

Adjusting for the zoom level from google and the scale of the scanned site plan was painful. I decided to match Ramnadi while sacrificing for the bridge and Sus road which went a bit offfset.


Still I have few inferences:
(1) Ramnadi has certainly shifted its course over a period of 31 yrs. Its fine by me since we know rivers have a natural tendancy for this.
(2) Also the two islands in Ramnadi shown prominently near survey 139 have almost vanished.

The most interesting part of this site plan is the road from the bridge over Ramnadi that shows the garden in survey 140 and Whispering Wind in survey 135/2 on the same direct road.
This road has almost vanished now and State Bank Nagar, Nikash lawns, Vanshaj Prestige, etc. have come up on top of this road.

Survey 132 is the site for OJAS, Kumar Sahwas, etc. and survey 135/1 for Meadows Avenue, etc. But there is no survey indicated for sites of Athashree, Basant Bahar, Camelia, etc. This is perhaps because surveys in those days @1978 was done with the Ramnadi as reference. Pashan-Baner Link road is just the western boundaries of surveys 130, 131, 132, etc.

Later in recent times, when surveys for those sites to the left of P-B link road was done i.e. for Athashree, Basant Bahar, etc, the foot of hills was taken as reference and surveys were marked down the slope towards Ramnadi.


The line of conflict where these two systems met is the real Pashan-Baner link road in front of Whipsering Wind. A testimony to this is the stripe of land near Kumar Sahwas.

This clearly shows how the width of the Pashan-Baner Link road opposite Valenncia or Magnolia was sacrificed due to surveys done with two different references.

So whether City Pride comes to Pashan or otherwise, my pride in Pashan would always be - Whispering Wind !!

History and Rumors

Many like calling Pashan-Baner link road the other way, as Baner-Pashan Link road for reasons best known to them.

In my logic it should be Pashan-Baner link rd, since the road provides Pashan people connectivity to Baner. Our official addresses atleast are like this. And why anyone from Baner would like to access areas in Pashan at any point in their life? Anyways, there are few rumors and some interesting history to this road.

The original Pashan-Baner Link Road was supposed to start off Sus road near this place as seen in the picture below taken sometime in June 2007:




The major projects as on 22-April-2009 on this road are Kumar Shantiniketan, past Kumar Sahawas, Montvert Biaritzz, Magnolia, past Whispering Wind, Crystal Garden passing through the Rolling Hills area between the Rolling Hills appartment on the right and the row houses on the left, finally touching Baner road at a place somewhere ahead of food bazar.





For many months until Mar-2008 when throughfare from Rolling Hills was allowed due to work on Pashan-Baner Link road, I remember a board inside the Rolling Hills area mentioning 'Proposed Pashan-Baner Link Road'. This board was in the open space when one entered Rolling Hills gate and reached the other end of the concrete internal road.


The Current Pashan-Baner Link road starts at the Balaji Mandir Chowk and was supposed to go straight to Baner Gaon without a single turn as shown with dotted line. Orange County, Kubera Bahar, Athashri, OJAS, Basant-Bahar, Camelia, etc. being the major projects along this stretch. But rumors are that the road was diverted to the right towards Ramnadi as shown in the Google view below.

To me this diversion towards Ramnadi looks fine, since today we can access both Aundh and also reach Pune Univ square faster than it would have been if the road had gone straight to Baner Gaothan.

But the fate of the straight road did not end here. If it had travelled straight as shown in map below, a bridge would have come up over RamNadi at the spot circled red.

But this was not to happen. Afterall why would the Richie Rich in town allow a busy road pass right beside their peaceful and serene backyard. So the road was diverted to the left again towards its final destiny to Baner road only awaiting its most miserable part in the last leg besides Symantec.

As seen in this image above, the Pashan-Baner Link Road would have touched Baner road somewhere between hotels Bhairavee and GreenPark, the closest Pashan people could have got to Aundh and University.

On its last leg, rumors are that work on the Pashan-Baner Link road was again stuck up besides Symantec. The present stretch of the road was within their premises and part of their planned parking space which again is only a rumor. Besides, there were also many other privately owned plots that were at risk of vanishing for this stretch of the road to be realised. Finally rumors are, there was long debate with PMC over who should create the retaining wall between Ramnadi and the road besides Symantec that is seen today.

Above is part of the old Baner-Balewadi development plan, a 5 Mb jpg downloaded from the pmc website. It summarizes and confirms all roumers and stories.

Baner road is 30M wide. Later this was widened for the CYG 2008 games. The Pashan-Baner Link Road is 24M wide and clearly shown crossing the Ramnadi in the bottom-right corner of the image.

The road that goes past Whispering Wind, Magnolia, Crystal Garden crosses over the 24M wide PB link road and is clearly shown going through Rolling Hills. This part is shown 9M wide and has now been closed as mentioned earlier.

The road besides Symantec is shown 18M wide and it finally touches Baner road which inturn crosses the Ramnadi in Survey No. 270.

The 24M wide Pashan-Baner Link Road clearly demarcates Pashan from Baner and the Pashan area is left un-detailed since this is a Baner-Balewadi DP map.

More photos and other interesting stories on the Pashan-Baner Link road in my next post. So keep scrolling...

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.

Deceiving View

This is a view of the Pashan-Baner Link road area taken from atop Whispering Wind A-bldg in mid-July of 2008 . Greenery on the distant mountains and sunshine everywhere just after a monsoon shower renders this landscape deceivingly beautiful.


A closer look however shows the ground realities. The area circled red in the photo above is enlarged as below and reveals water flowing freely on the road in front of Kumar Sahwas:


Another much closer ground level snap taken by Vikrant Kelkar a year earlier on 7-July-2007 shows the scaring reality. He sarcastically called this a red-carpet in one of his mails. Below is the photo showing road condition just in front of Kumar Sahwas:



The depiction of this turn on Kumar Builder brochure is again deceiving as seen below, but that is so typical of builders.


In year 2009 I don't expect things to change much on this critical turn near Kumar Sahwas unless residents of Whispering Wind who are the sole sufferrers take combined efforts, especially following blunt comments by Mr. Ajit Shrowty, chairman of OJAS society "since we do not use this road, we are not with you" when I approached them for a joint application to PMC for the water logging issue.

Saving Internal Roads

The channel outside the Whispering Wind main gate is critical to the health of internal roads. People who have been living in this area before construction began recollect there was a natural stream along the fencing wall between Whispering Wind and Valenncia.
In this photo dated 31 Aug 2004 cliked by Mr. Sudhir Kolhatkar, Kumar Sahwas is seen under construction and water from the right side flowed downstream towards Whispering Wind which is on the left. The man seen closest in the photo is walking in the direction of Rolling Hills.

So a channel was dug up and pipes were laid across the road. Former caretaker Ratnappa is seen seated center in striped shirt in photo below.

After completion, clear spring water from the hills flew into the concrete channel of Whispering Wind as seen in the photo taken during monsoon 2007.

Meanwhile the properly tarred road seen just above the pipes was claimed by WW builder as made jointly by them and Paranjpe of Magnolia. But on contacted, Paranjpe builder supervisor categorically refuted the claim and was ready to furnish the bills for the road claiming that entire stretch of the raod was build by them alone.

When work on Valenncia began in early 2009 they leveled the rough terrain outside their building limits and apparently the channel was filled up with the rubble.

On the other side of the road was made a proper chamber for preventing rubble or dirt to choke the pipes. Inlet to the two pipes is seen open as on 21-May-2009.

Farther beyond this square chamber, a U-shaped accumulator was made which channelised all water flowing from uphill properly into the concrete channel built between Whispering Wind and Magnolia.

I tried scratching the surface to look for existence of any pipe and easily found part of a black pipe which I realised was the same that is seen outside the flowing stream in the photo above.

I am sure the two other pipes for water still exist under the rubble. So unless all the openings for the pipes are cleaned open before onset of monsoon, the quality the internal roads is bound to drain.

Between april 2009 and the monsoon season the same year, housekeeping staff had grown lax and falied on many occassions to collect the dry+wet garbage from the four buildings before 10:30 am which is the standard time for the PMC van to collect from society gates.
So the kuda-karkat was simply dumped into the U-shaped accumulator as seen in picture below:

This blocked the flow of rainwater from the upper areas towards WW.
Also the square chamber which prevented water from flowing over the road was choked up and inlet to the underground pipes blocked:

So water simply flowed over the road towards WW as seen in picture below:

Rainwater flowed over the internal road between the clubhouse wall and the concrete channel which was supposed to drain the stormwater beyond WW.It flowed father down past A-bldg over the newly laid tar carpet depositing a thick layer of sand and mud on the far end seen in photo below:

I then removed with bare hands all the stuff that was blocking the square-chamber and now water was no longer flowing over the road since the pipes were still intact and un-chocked.

But on the other end closer to WW, the pipe openings were still covered with rada-roda dumped by valenncia.

I tried clearing up the clog at the outlet of the pipes and water gushed out vertically from the ground. Curious onlooker gathered closer since they knew nothing about the pipe that was below the road. The flow was still in the direction of WW gate:

Anil Hasabe (in striped shirt above) came in quickly with big helping hands and got the flow channelised towards Valenncia with little help from a labour standing nearby, and into the big concrete channel inside WW that was supposed to drain the rain water.
But the ordeal of the internal road was not not to end here. Recently when work on E-Bldg started, the BoB rode into WW onto the same internal road that the rainwater had awashed a couple of months back.

Then it took a turn with high speed and one can best imagine how the life of a thin crust of tar would be affected with such torture:

Finally, the Bob went towards D-bldg leaving behind it a trail of dents on the thin layer of tar ... and thus apathy prevailed in WW.