Somewhere on the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road, under a sheet of monsoon water that looked no different from any other flooded stretch of Mumbai, a pothole was waiting. It had no warning sign, no barricade, nothing to mark it as anything other than more grey road.
A motorbike carrying two brothers home rode straight into it — and in the seconds after, one father’s entire life split into a before and an after.
Nine years later, that same man walks the city’s streets at dawn with a shovel over his shoulder, broken paver blocks in a sack, and a name Mumbai has given him that he never asked for: Pothole Dada.
A phone call that changed everything
Dadarao Bilhore was standing in his grocery store in Andheri, getting ready to break his Ekadashi fast, when his phone rang. His sons, Ram and Prakash, had fallen off their bike near Seepz.
Nothing serious, he was told — they’d sought shelter from the rain, then ridden on once the water eased, only for their bike to vanish into a pothole hidden beneath the flooded road.
He left for the hospital alone, still believing it was a scare rather than a tragedy. Halfway there, a second call arrived. Ram was alive, shaken and bleeding but saved by his helmet.
Somewhere between grief and action, a father found a way to keep his son’s memory alive. Photograph: (LA Times)
16-year-old Prakash, riding pillion without one, had been flung further and had landed with an impact his body could not survive. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage. He was gone.
Dadarao didn’t tell the rest of the family. Not that day. He waited almost 24 hours, until Ram had stabilised, before anyone else learned that Prakash was never coming home.
When his wife finally did, she remembers seizing her husband by the shirt and saying, “You promised to bring my son back the way he left this morning, she told him. Give me my son back.” There was no version of that promise he could keep.
Grief that picked up a shovel
A month later, while the wound was still raw enough that most people would have folded inward, Dadarao did something almost nobody around him expected.
He walked out with a shovel, a sack of broken paver blocks, gravel and stones, found the nearest pothole, and began to fill it with his own hands.
It wasn’t only his son he was thinking of. He had heard of a mother killed instantly in an accident near Ambernath. A wife thrown from her vehicle and killed in Bandra. Different roads, different families, the same cause.
And every time, the pattern afterwards was identical — officials arriving only once a body already had.
“I observed how authorities waited until someone died to fill potholes and file FIRs,” he says. “I couldn’t let any more people die like Prakash.”
Every year around Prakash’s death anniversary, Dadarao returns to the roads with his shovel and his mission. Photograph: (The Indian Express)
So he stopped waiting for them. Since that first pothole in 2015, he has filled more than 1,450 — most of them along the edges of roads, four to five feet wide, exactly the kind a rider doesn’t see until the front wheel is already gone.
He describes the work almost as a conversation with his son. “When someone asks me why I fill potholes, I tell them, I have lost my kid, I don’t want you to lose yours,” he says. “Whenever I fill one pothole, I feel I have saved someone. My son didn’t return, but somebody else’s son will go home safe. So what if my clothes get stained, or my arms get muddy? It doesn’t matter.”
One shovel becomes a citywide fix
Word of a grieving father filling potholes with his bare hands doesn’t stay quiet for long in a city like Mumbai.
His example helped give rise to the Fill in the Potholes Project, a citizen collective, and the Spothole app that came out of it — built on nothing more complicated than a phone’s camera and GPS, letting any resident report a pothole’s exact location the moment they spot it, instead of watching it fester for weeks.
That gap between spotting a problem and fixing it is what Dadarao has always aimed his shovel at. By his estimate, even a properly reported pothole can take two to three weeks to be filled through official channels — a window wide enough for someone else’s Prakash to fall through.
His own method was never meant to replace the system. It was meant to hold the road together until the system caught up.
His mission began with a flooded road, an unseen pothole and a 16-year-old son who never made it home. Photograph: (LA Times)
The idea has since travelled well beyond his own neighbourhood. In Hyderabad, a retired railway employee named Bala Gangadhar Tilak picked up the same cause independently and has since filled 1,500 potholes of his own, earning the title ‘Pride of Telangana’.
The fight hasn’t ended yet
Filling potholes has never been Dadarao’s only answer to what happened on that stretch of road.
He has also pursued an FIR against the civic officials and contractor responsible for maintaining it — a case that remains in front of the Borivali District Court, built on the fact that the pothole had opened up during unmarked construction work, with no barricade or warning sign to protect anyone riding over it.
His loss has also become a plea he repeats to every rider who’ll listen: wear a helmet, and make sure whoever rides behind you wears one too. Not putting one on Prakash that day, he says, is the one thing he cannot forgive himself for.
For every pothole he fills, Dadarao carries the hope that another family will be spared his loss. Photograph: (Hindustan Times)
Every year around Prakash’s death anniversary, Dadarao performs a small ritual for his son, then picks up his shovel again — often joined by fellow volunteers — and fills potholes near Seepz, at the very spot the road took his son from him.
Nine years on, what began as one man’s private way of refusing to let go has become one of Mumbai’s most recognisable acts of civic grief, ten muddy minutes at a time, so that somebody else’s son gets to go home.
About the campaign
This story is part of The Better India’s #CivicSenseHeroes, a year-long nationwide campaign celebrating citizens who take responsibility for the places and communities we all share. From cleaner streets and safer roads to restored lakes and public spaces, we’re looking for everyday Indians turning civic sense into action. Know someone doing work like this? Nominate your Civic Sense Hero here.
