The Pune Municipal Corporation’s flagship pothole-complaint app, Road Mitra, sat non-functional for several months this year, through the heart of the monsoon, before civic officials noticed and reactivated it. Punekar News reports the app went dark because PMC let its SMS gateway subscription lapse, cutting off the alerts that route citizen complaints to the road department. Road department head Rajesh Bankar confirmed this week that the app works again and complaints are being logged.
A 72-hour promise that broke
PMC launched Road Mitra in August 2025 with real ambition. Residents could upload a photo or video of a pothole, geotagged automatically, and track its status until repair. The Bridge Chronicle’s coverage of the launch quotes Municipal Commissioner Naval Kishore Ram promising the app would make repairs “faster and more transparent,” with officers required to close complaints within 72 hours or face disciplinary action. Within six months, that system stopped working. Officials in both PMC’s IT department and its road department reportedly did not know, according to Punekar News, until complaints about the outage surfaced on their own.
What it means for Pune residents
Pune’s roads take their worst battering during the monsoon. Water pools in cracks, subgrade material washes out, and fresh potholes appear within days of resurfacing; the city saw exactly that pattern this year, including a resurfaced stretch in Mundhwa that caved in days after the work finished. For a stretch of that same season, the one formal digital channel meant to route citizen complaints straight to the road department was switched off, with no public notice that it had failed. Residents who tried to report hazards through the app during that window found their complaints going nowhere, with no fallback communicated by the civic body. The failure exposes a simple fact: a transparency tool depends on the unglamorous back-end subscription that keeps it running, and PMC was not watching that subscription.
PMC separately ran a hands-on “Pothole Free Pune” drive this year, using dedicated engineering teams instead of relying on the app alone, a sign that citizen-reported fixes were not closing the gap on their own. With Road Mitra back online, residents can again file geotagged complaints and expect the same 72-hour repair commitment PMC made at launch. That promise now carries the weight of one demonstrated lapse.
Outlook
The test ahead is whether PMC builds any monitoring around the app’s own uptime, so a lapsed subscription does not again go unnoticed for months. Residents can judge the reactivation over the coming weeks by checking whether complaints filed now see repairs inside the promised window, and whether PMC publishes an accounting of what happened to complaints lodged during the outage.
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.
Sources: Punekar News, The Bridge Chronicle