Mumbai Roads Monitor

Gaps in BMC's road data

What BMC's public roads dashboard does not tell the public, in plain terms. Each point is measured from BMC's own records (snapshot of 19 October 2026, with daily history since 4 July 2026). How the site works around each gap is in methodology.md.

Reporting

  1. BMC never defines "late". A road has a status and an end date, and nothing else: no revised deadline, no reason for delay, no extension on record. Whether a road is late is left for the reader to work out.

  2. "Completed" has no date. BMC flips a road to Completed but never says when the work finished, so no one can tell a road delivered on time from one delivered a year late. Of 37 roads BMC marked Completed between July and October 2026, 26 were flipped 76 to 566 days after their deadline, and 6 were flipped while BMC's own progress figure was below 90%.

  3. Deadlines are season targets, not contract dates. 44% of end dates fall on 30 or 31 May, the pre-monsoon cut-off. Roads in the same contract share a deadline while being at very different stages: one batch of 15 roads with the same contractor, contract, and deadline ranges from 0% to 98% of its final concrete laid.

  4. Start dates are rewritten, not recorded. BMC fills in a start date, usually backdated, when a road moves to In Progress or Completed, and clears it when a road goes On Hold or is Deleted. Every one of the 29 start-date changes we have seen came with a status change. The field says nothing about when work actually began.

  5. Statuses contradict BMC's own progress data.

    • Roads stay "In Progress" after BMC's progress figure says the concrete is fully laid (10 today).
    • 10 of the 11 recorded "PQC completion dates" sit on roads whose progress figure is below 95%, and 3 of those dates are in the future.
    • "Completion" photos were uploaded in bulk and appear on unfinished roads, including 67 active roads and a road still listed as Not Started.
    • Some Completed roads have start dates in the future or after their own end date.

  6. Roads are deleted without notice or reason. 34 roads were deleted between July and October 2026, including one that was overdue and 52% complete. Five deleted roads later came back as Completed. Nothing on BMC's dashboard records that a road was ever there.

  7. "Not Started" roads sit past their deadline with no explanation. 49 roads are listed as Not Started although their deadline has passed; none of them has changed since at least July. BMC publishes no reason, such as a pending permission or utility work.

Data quality

  1. Data-entry errors are published as-is. Dates in the year 0206 and 0001, road shapes that are a single point (3), listed lengths that differ from the drawn road by more than three times (27 roads), work codes from the wrong contract, and road names containing line breaks or doubled spaces (18).

  2. Two BMC datasets disagree. The project list and the map layer carry different start dates for the same road, so 168 road shapes can only be matched by name and ward. 9% of listed roads (191) have no shape on BMC's map at all, and 145 carry no work code.

  3. Records have no stable public identity. BMC renames roads and corrects wards without a change log, and publishes no permanent record number, so a link to "this road" breaks when BMC edits it. The API is undocumented and unversioned.

Missing altogether

  1. No money. Road records carry no contract value, cost, or payment. Tenders are on a separate state portal, with documents behind a CAPTCHA and nothing linking a tender to the roads it pays for.

  2. No outcomes. Nothing public shows whether a finished road stays pothole-free: complaints live in BMC's app with no public feed.

  3. No history. BMC's dashboard shows only the current state. Every earlier status, date, and deletion is gone unless someone saves it, which is why this site keeps its own history ledger.