The Nagpur Municipal Corporation has counted 1,282 potholes across the city and repaired 948 of them by August 31, according to its own survey. Ganeshotsav begins on September 14. The department doing the patching is working with half the machines it needs.

The survey put the worst damage in Dharampeth, with 353 potholes, and Hanuman Nagar, with 280, spread over roughly 12,380 square metres of a road network the civic body puts at about 4,587 km. Five hot mix teams are out, with night work on Zero Mile and Central Avenue to keep daytime traffic moving. Residents have questioned whether the count captures the real state of the roads, which is a fair thing to ask of a survey conducted in the middle of a monsoon that keeps opening new ones.

The fleet behind the number

The equipment position explains the arithmetic better than the pothole count does. The hot mix department has five of ten heavy-duty tippers running, two of five rollers, and one pick-up van against a requirement of four. It has asked for an emergency two-month package of about Rs 3.61 crore covering five more tippers, three rollers, four pick-up vans, 980 metric tonnes of bitumen and 150 units of Hincol emulsion. That approval was still pending as the festival window closed in.

Separately, the standing committee cleared Rs 1.49 crore on August 21 for an Insta Road Patcher, a pressure-sensitive machine meant to fill potholes more durably. The administration’s stated reason for buying it was that earlier repairs were failing within about a fortnight. A machine sanctioned in late August will not change what the roads look like by September 14.

Why the same story returns each monsoon

Nagpur’s roads answer to several masters. The NMC maintains part of the network, the Nagpur Improvement Trust another, and the PWD, NHAI and Maha Metro hold stretches of their own. A road resurfaced under one budget gets opened months later for a cable or a sewer line under another, and the coordination that would prevent this sits with nobody in particular.

That pattern is visible right now. Utility agencies have kept digging through the monsoon despite a court directive against it, laying pipelines, sewage lines and underground cabling while rain turns the excavated earth to slurry. The Bombay High Court’s Nagpur bench has already pulled up the civic body this monsoon over recurring waterlogging, telling it that paperwork alone will not fix the drains.

What it means for residents

For the ten days after September 14, mandal processions and immersion routes will draw crowds onto exactly the arterial roads that are worst hit. Two-wheeler riders and pedestrians carry most of the risk on a broken surface at night, and the routes through Dharampeth and Hanuman Nagar are the ones to plan around.

Complaints go to the NMC zone office covering the road, and a photograph with a location is the version that tends to move. Filing one has a second use beyond the pothole itself. Complaint volumes are the record that survives the festival, and they are what the High Court and the standing committee end up reading when the same question comes back next June.

What to watch

The immediate marker is whether the Rs 3.61 crore procurement clears in time to matter, or lands after the festival as a budget line for next year. The longer one is the digging. If agencies are still cutting into resurfaced roads in October, the 1,282 potholes counted this August will read as a floor rather than a total, and the Insta Road Patcher will spend its first season chasing damage that other departments created.

Sources: Nagpur Today, The Hitavada, The Live Nagpur

This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.