Accelerating growth in the transport sector, a booming construction industry, and a growing industrial sector are responsible for worsening air pollution in Indian cities. While estimates of health impacts are effective in raising overall concern about air quality, they do not specifically answer the question of what are the sources of air pollution and and what is their contribution. Further uncontrolled growth will lead to more pollution and require large recurring investments to control pollution.

The City of Pune, Maharashtra, India is well known as the city of Two Wheelers and has a large two wheeler
population; Also the traffic here is prone to frequent congestions during peak hours; leading to jams causing huge
delays in travel times. Moreover, pollution created by these vehicles is a huge cause of concern for the public and
local authorities alike. To tackle this problem, the Pune Municipal Corporation came up with a plan to implement
the BRTS in Dec. 2006, and successfully introduced it on a 13 KM stretch, becoming the first city in India to do so.

Accelerating growth in the transport sector, a booming construction industry, and a growing industrial sector are responsible for worsening air pollution in Indian cities. While estimates of health impacts are effective in raising overall concern about air quality, they do not specifically answer the question of where the pollution is coming from and how much each of these sources contributes towards air pollution. Further uncontrolled growth will lead to more pollution and require large recurring investments to control pollution.

Parisar compared the performance of PMPML with bus service providers in five other Indian cities; BEST (Mumbai); MTC (Chennai); BMTC (Bangalore) and DTC (Delhi). In a previous study titled PMPML Report card, Parisar had quantified the performance of PMPML, which showed how PMPML scored low on all counts. The current study concludes that PMPML also performs considerably worse than other bus systems in Indian cities. The comparison was based on 3 categories: Quality of Service, Operational Efficiency and Financial Performance.

This study under the SIM-air program was initiated with support from the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation (New Delhi, India) to better understand the sources of air pollution in the Pune city and to support an integrated dialogue between local pollution management and climate policy in a co-benefits framework.

Parisar recently published a commuter-centric performance report for Pune's city bus service, PMPML. The service was graded on the following aspects; RELIABILITY, COMFORT, CONVENIENCE and AFFORDABILITY. The score for each was based on various parameters and arrived at using data from PMPML, Parisar surveys and Commuter feedback survey.

Parisar analyzed the budgetary allocation on transportation sector in Pune’s 2011-12 budget. It emerges that more than 60% of the transport sector budget is allocated to projects which are motor vehicle friendly like building of new roads, flyovers, parking structures and re-tarring of roads. On the other hand, non-motorized friendly and public-transport friendly projects get only 9% and 18% respectively of the budget allocation in spite of including doubtful projects such as subways, skywalks, BRT (as currently implemented) and Metro (as currently planned).

Parisar has analyzed the budget of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) for the year 2011-12 for the following: the budgetary trends over the last few years, the sectoral priorities of PMC,general accounting practices of PMC and the ease of understanding the budget by common citizens by a method developed by Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA).