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He’s Filled 600 Potholes in Memory of His Son(subtitled)

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A Mumbai vegetable vendor turned grief into a shovel, and the city started calling him “Pothole Dada.”

Dadarao Bilhore sells fruit and vegetables for a living, but for the last several monsoon seasons he has spent his early mornings doing something else entirely: kneeling in the middle of Mumbai’s traffic, packing broken paver blocks, sand and gravel into road craters with his bare hands. He does it in memory of his 16-year-old son, Prakash, who died after a motorcycle accident on a flooded, pothole-ravaged stretch of road in July 2015. By the time Great Big Story caught up with him, Bilhore had personally filled roughly 600 potholes across the city.

• Bilhore’s son Prakash, 16, died of fatal brain damage after being thrown from a motorcycle that hit a waterlogged pothole on Mumbai’s Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road during the July 2015 monsoon floods.
• Working with a shovel, trowels, and materials scavenged from nearby construction sites, Bilhore has filled about 600 potholes across Mumbai’s roads since his son’s death.
• He’s since drawn volunteers and citizens into the effort, using the grassroots campaign to pressure the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation over the city’s long-neglected road maintenance.

The Accident That Started It

Prakash Bilhore was riding pillion on his cousin’s motorcycle when it struck a deep, water-filled pothole on the JVLR during one of Mumbai’s punishing monsoon downpours. The impact threw him from the bike. He suffered fatal brain damage and died shortly after — one of thousands of casualties tied to India’s notoriously poor monsoon-season roads, where flooding regularly hides craters deep enough to swallow a motorcycle’s front wheel.

For Dadarao Bilhore, the loss wasn’t abstract policy failure — it was a specific stretch of asphalt that took his son. Rather than let it end there, he decided the same road, and every road like it, needed to be fixed by someone, and that someone might as well be him.

Shovel, Sand And Grief

Bilhore didn’t wait for a municipal contractor. He started going out with a basic shovel and trowels, hauling broken paver blocks, sand and gravel from construction sites near his vending route, and packing them into potholes by hand. No crew, no funding, no official mandate — just a vendor who knew exactly what an unfilled crater could do to a family.

Every pothole he fills, Bilhore has said, is an act of prayer for his son.

The work is slow and repetitive by design — one pothole at a time, road by road, season after season, as Mumbai’s monsoons refill the craters he’s already patched. It’s the kind of manual repair job more commonly seen in DIY concrete and curb work than in civic activism, except Bilhore isn’t building a fence — he’s trying to keep other riders from ending up like his son.

From One Vendor To A Movement

Word of Bilhore’s routine spread through his neighborhood and beyond, earning him the nickname “Pothole Dada” — Pothole Brother. Volunteers and other citizens began joining him on repair runs, turning a solitary act of mourning into an organized public-awareness campaign aimed squarely at the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the civic body responsible for maintaining the city’s roads.

Mumbai’s pothole problem isn’t a fringe complaint — it’s an annual, city-wide hazard that surfaces every monsoon as heavy rain erodes road surfaces faster than municipal crews can patch them. Bilhore’s campaign has leaned into that reality, using his own repairs as visible proof of both the scale of the problem and how little it actually costs to fix a single crater by hand.

A Vendor’s Daily Ritual, Repeated 600 Times

What separates Bilhore from a typical road-safety advocate is the sheer repetition — nearly 600 individual pothole repairs, each one done with the same shovel-and-gravel method, each one tied back to a single date on the JVLR in July 2015. It’s a grassroots response to a citywide infrastructure gap, running parallel to broader stories about people improvising fixes to urban street-life problems that official systems have been too slow to address.

Bilhore has kept at it without any indication of stopping, and Mumbai keeps flooding every monsoon, which means the potholes keep coming back. As long as that cycle holds, so does his: shovel out, gravel in, one more crater gone in his son’s name.