page_title: History of Pune
section_title: City growth and development
hierarchical_section_title: History of Pune / Post-Independence (1947–present) / City growth and development
caption_attribution_description: English: Pune City Expansion.
context_page_description: Pune is the 9th most populous city in India and the second-largest in the state of Maharashtra, after the state capital Mumbai. The history of the city is closely related to the rise of the Maratha empire from the 17th–18th century. During the 18th century, Pune became the political centre of the Indian subcontinent; as the seat of the Peshwas, who were the prime ministers of the Maratha Empire.
  After the fall of Peshwa rule in 1818, the new British rulers made the city one of their major military bases. Prior to the British takeover, the city was confined to the eastern bank of the Mutha river. Since then, the city has grown on both sides of the river. In the 19th and early 20th century, Pune was considered by the British as the center of political unrest against their rule. The post-independence era saw Pune emerging as a major manufacturing center.
  The post-independence period has also seen further growth in the higher education sector in the city. The Panshet flood of 1961 resulted in a huge loss of housing on the river bank and spurred the growth of new suburbs. In the 1990s, the city emerged as a major information technology hub.
context_section_description: The population of the city grew rapidly after independence, from nearly 0.5–0.8 million in 1968 to 1. 5 million in 1976. By 1996, the population had increased to 2.5 million. By 2001, the population had increased to 3.76 million, making Pune one of the twenty most populous cities in India. The city until the 1970s was referred to as "Pensioners' Paradise", since many government officers, civil engineers, and Army personnel preferred to settle down in Pune after their retirement The status of Pune was elevated from town to city, when the Municipality was converted into Pune Mahanagar Palika or the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) in the year 1950. In order to integrate planning, the Pune Metropolitan Region covering the areas under PMC, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, the three cantonments, and the surrounding villages was defined in 1967.
  Industrial development started in the 1950s, in the outlining areas of the city such as Hadapsar, Bhosari, and Pimpri. The first big operation to set up shop was the government run Hindustan Antibiotics in Pimpri in 1954. The area around Bhosari was set aside for industrial development, by the newly created MIDC in the early 1960s. MIDC provided the necessary infrastructure for new businesses to set up operations. Telco (now Tata Motors) started operations in 1961, which gave a huge boost to the automobile sector. After 1970, Pune emerged as the leading engineering city of the country with Telco, Bajaj, Kinetic, Bharat Forge, Alfa Laval, Atlas Copco, Sandvik, and Thermax expanding their infrastructure. This allowed the city to compete with Chennai for the title of "Detroit of India" at that time. The growth in the Pimpri Chinchwad and Bhosari areas allowed these areas to incorporate as the separate city of Pimpri-Chinchwad. In light of the rapid growth, the Pune metropolitan area was defined in 1967. It includes Pune, the three cantonment areas and numerous surrounding suburbs. After the 1991 economic liberalization, Pune began to attract foreign capital, particularly in the information technology and engineering industries. During the three years before 2000, Pune saw huge development in the Information Technology sector, and IT Parks were set up in Aundh, Hinjewadi, and Nagar road By 2005, Pune overtook both Mumbai and Chennai to have more than 200,000 IT professionals. In the year 2008, many multinational automobile companies like General Motors, Volkswagen, and Fiat, set up facilities near Pune in the Chakan and Talegaon areas.
  Public transport in form of bus service, was introduced in the city just before independence using a private provider. The city took over the service after independence, as Poona Municipal transport (PMT). In the 1990s the PMT and Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Transport (PCMT), the bus company running the service in Pimpri-Chinchwad, had a combined fleet of over a thousand buses. Several employers from the Industrial belt near Pimpri – Chinchwad and Hadapsar, also offered private bus service to their employees due to patchy municipal transport. The number of buses belonging to these companies was several times more than the number of Municipal buses. The two bus companies merged in 2007 to form the PMML. In 2006, the city was the first in India to develop the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRT), but due to a number of factors the project ran into delays. In 2008, the Commonwealth Youth Games took place in the city, which encouraged additional development in the north-west region of the city, and added a fleet of buses running on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). Pune was also connected to other towns and cities in Maharashtra by Maharashtra State Transport buses that began operating in 1951.
  From the 1960s onward, horse-drawn Tanga was gradually replaced by the motorized three-wheeler Autorickshaw, for intermediate public transport. Their number grew from 200 in 1960, to over 20,000 in 1996. From the 1930s, Pune was known as the cycle city of India. However, the cycle was replaced by motorized two-wheelers from the 1970s onward. For example, the number of two
caption: Expansion of Pune
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