Pune Municipal Corporation’s drive to remove 467 trees for road widening in Kothrud has been temporarily halted after local residents protested and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena demanded that the civic body produce a current permission for the work. Around 50 trees were removed over two days near Avenue City Pride before the operation was stopped.
The proposed road widening concerns Survey Numbers 12/2 and 12/5 in Kothrud. The road is marked as 20 metres wide in Pune’s development plan, and the trees have been identified as an obstruction to the planned expansion, according to the report by Loksatta – Pune.
PMC’s road department had obtained approval from the Tree Authority Committee three years ago to remove or relocate the trees. The proposal covers 467 trees in total: 149 were approved for complete removal, while the remaining 318 were to be removed and replanted elsewhere. Permission for cutting the trees was granted in September 2023, the report said.
The road department began acting on that earlier approval and removed approximately 50 trees during the two-day drive. The use of a three-year-old approval became the central point of the dispute after residents objected to the scale of the work and questioned whether the civic body currently had valid permission to continue.
The local residents said they opposed the removal of such a large number of trees for the road project and maintained that the trees should not be cut under any circumstances. The protest brought the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena into the matter, with the party demanding that PMC show a current approval before proceeding with further tree removal.
The episode places the city’s road-widening process alongside the administrative role of the Tree Authority Committee, which approved the original proposal. It also raises an operational question about how approvals granted several years earlier are applied when the work begins later, particularly when the project involves the removal of hundreds of mature trees.
For residents in the area, the immediate issue is whether the planned 20-metre road will proceed and what will happen to the trees included in the original proposal. PMC has temporarily stopped the tree-felling drive following the opposition. The next step is expected to depend on the civic body’s presentation of the permission and the response to the residents’ objections.
