Mumbai’s ₹17,000 crore road construction project, launched in 2022 to make the city largely pothole-free, has reached approximately 80.5% completion after three years. According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), 1,575 of the planned 2,175 roads have been fully converted to M40-grade concrete, while 325 are partially complete and 275 have not yet begun. The project is being executed in two phases, with Phase I expected to finish by the end of 2026 and Phase II by May 2027. Although the initiative was originally budgeted at around ₹12,000 crore, its cost has risen beyond ₹17,000 crore. Despite this high cost, this project is making significant steps towards making Mumbai “pothole-free”, which would eliminate a major challenge to the estimated 23 million people who live in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
A recent article in ThePrint emphasizes that progress has been highly uneven across Mumbai. Western suburban areas such as Borivali and Dahisar are nearly or completely finished, while much of South and Central Mumbai—including Colaba, Byculla, Dongri, and surrounding neighborhoods—lags significantly behind. Officials attribute these delays primarily to the city’s dense underground utility network, where each road may contain more than 15 water, sewer, gas, electric, and telecommunications lines that must be relocated before construction can proceed. Additional challenges include monsoon shutdowns and traffic restrictions that limit heavy construction equipment in the city’s older districts. Despite these difficulties, BMC officials argue that concrete roads will provide a pothole-free service life of at least 10 years—and potentially 25–30 years—while being less vulnerable to water infiltration and repeated utility excavations than traditional asphalt pavements.
Read more about this incredible project: https://theprint.in/india/governance/3-years-rs-17000-crore-later-mumbais-ambitious-concrete-roads-project-is-80-complete/2950617/