E-Paper
Meet Pune’s civic ‘influencer’ who got the PMC to repair over 80 potholes with his videos
Not only have Pandit’s short videos on Instagram and You Tube (some) prompted the civic body to urgently repair more than 80 potholes in the city, he has become a civic issues celebrity and social media ‘influencer’ of sorts with 1.59 lakh followers on You Tube
Punekar Santosh Pandit, 45, has taken the current trend of Instagram ‘reels’ and You Tube ‘shorts’ to a whole new level by posting short videos about civic issues, mainly potholes and damaged roads in the city, so as to make the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) sit up and take notice, and most importantly, repair these for the benefit of the citizens.
Not only have Pandit’s short videos on Instagram and You Tube (some) prompted the civic body to urgently repair more than 80 potholes in the city, he has become a civic issues celebrity and social media ‘influencer’ of sorts with 1.59 lakh followers on You Tube and 16,000 followers on Instagram within two or three months. While most of Pandit’s videos have a way of going viral, one particular video featuring a pothole on Karve Road, uploaded on April 2, 2023, has garnered over 19M views on You Tube.
Pandit said, “I am working in the social sector for the last many years and have helped many people who suffered losses in their business after the Covid-19 lockdown. While working and making videos about social issues, I decided to consider the ground reality and identify the problems faced by the common people on a daily basis. From March 2023, I started making short videos about potholes, damaged roads and other civic issues to which I got a great response from people on social media. After uploading the videos, the PMC officials/workers would take immediate cognisance of these issues and repair the featured pothole or damaged road. Till now, more than 80 such potholes have been repaired on a priority basis due to my videos.”
“I don’t complain to the civic body or any other government agency. My only concern is the common people who travel on city roads that they should not be hurt or meet with accidents due to these potholes. As I shoot the videos in a different way with slogans etc., they go viral on social media and the civic authorities too come to know the exact issue and speed-up the repairs. Otherwise, common people have to face so many problems whilst lodging complaints with the PMC or any other department,” Pandit said.
Pandit’s videos have a signature style that manages to draw attention to the problem at hand while also ratcheting (his) followers on social media. Once he identifies a civic issue, say a pothole on a road, he decorates the pothole with ‘rangoli’ and ‘garlands’ it and loudly raises slogans at the spot so that the public is more than made aware of the pothole. He then makes a short video of the spot, giving details of the issue in his own unique way before uploading the video on one or the other social media platform.
Pandit has become so influential that citizens plagued by their own brand of civic problems seek him out just to raise awareness about the problem and possibly get the civic body to do something about it. One such, Kamlesh Pawar, a citizen from Kumthekar Road area, called Pandit to raise a stink about a damaged drain outside his home. “Since the last many days, the drainage outside our building on Kumthekar Road is broken and no one is addressing the problem even after several complaints. So, we contacted Pandit (sir) and he came to the spot, highlighted the damaged drain with rangoli and stood there for more than six hours raising slogans…” said an elated Pawar.
