Journalism of Courage
After years of delays, Mumbai–Pune ‘Missing Link’ opens to ease traffic, but hundreds stranded on Day 1 for hours
The new stretch is designed to bypass the accident-prone and heavily congested ghat section of the expressway.
The bridge, designed for speeds of up to 100 kmph for light motor vehicles and 80 kmph for buses and passenger vehicles, is seeing cars stop abruptly, creating dangerous conditions for other commuters.
The bridge, designed for speeds of up to 100 kmph for light motor vehicles and 80 kmph for buses and passenger vehicles, is seeing cars stop abruptly, creating dangerous conditions for other commuters.
The bridge, designed for speeds of up to 100 kmph for light motor vehicles and 80 kmph for buses and passenger vehicles, is seeing cars stop abruptly, creating dangerous conditions for other commuters.
The bridge, designed for speeds of up to 100 kmph for light motor vehicles and 80 kmph for buses and passenger vehicles, is seeing cars stop abruptly, creating dangerous conditions for other commuters.
The bridge, designed for speeds of up to 100 kmph for light motor vehicles and 80 kmph for buses and passenger vehicles, is seeing cars stop abruptly, creating dangerous conditions for other commuters. (Photo: Screenshot from video shared by Devendra Fadnavis on X)
After nearly a decade of construction, delays and engineering challenges, the much-awaited Missing Link on the Mumbai–Pune Expressway was finally inaugurated on Friday only for its opening day to be marred by hours of traffic jams that left thousands of commuters stranded across the Khandala ghat.
At around 1 pm, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, along with Deputy Chief Ministers Eknath Shinde and Sunetra Pawar, inaugurated the 13.3-km corridor built by the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC). Within hours, the Pune-bound arm was opened to traffic, while the Mumbai-bound stretch remained temporarily shut till evening for dismantling of event infrastructure.
Envisaged as a permanent solution to the bottleneck-heavy and accident-prone ghat section, the Missing Link project traces its origins back to the mid-1990s, with renewed momentum after state approval in 2017. Construction began around 2018–19 but was pushed back repeatedly due to land clearances, complex terrain, monsoon disruptions and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Rs 6,695-crore project replaces a 19.8-km stretch of winding ghat roads with a 13.3-km high-speed alignment comprising viaducts, a 650-metre cable-stayed bridge over Tiger Valley, and twin tunnels stretching nearly 9 km through the Sahyadri hills. It is expected to reduce travel distance by 6 km and cut the journey time by at least 30 minutes, while also improving safety on a corridor notorious for accidents.
“This is not a missing link anymore, but a connecting link,” Fadnavis said at the inauguration. Acknowledging the chaos through the day, he added, “I apologise to motorists who were stuck in traffic today… soon this will be a thing of the past.”
The promise of smoother travel, however, contrasted sharply with the experience of commuters on Friday.
With the new route kept closed until the formal inauguration, all vehicles were forced onto the old ghat section during peak morning hours on the first day of a long weekend — a stretch already infamous for bottlenecks. The situation worsened as a lane on the expressway was shut for the event, squeezing road capacity further.
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Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis (in blue vest), Deputy Chief Ministers Eknath Shinde (in white) and Sunetra Pawar (in blue saree) inaugurated the missing link on Friday, (Photo: X/Devendra Fadnavis)
The result: traffic queues stretching several kilometres, vehicles crawling or standing still for hours, and multiple breakdowns reported amid intense heat.
Several commuters said they were stuck for over five hours, stretching up to nine hours. Families travelling out for the long weekend ran out of water, vehicles overheated, and several missed flights, functions and personal commitments. The convergence of holiday traffic, VIP movement and restricted road space created a near-gridlock across sections of the expressway.
Even Opposition leaders, including Supriya Sule, were caught in the jam. People reported running out of drinking water, lack of clean washrooms, and the oppressive heat.
Ironically, the Missing Link is designed to eliminate such choke points by bypassing the steep, winding ghat stretch where traffic from multiple lanes merges and slows down. Once fully operational in both directions, officials say it will significantly ease congestion and improve reliability on one of Maharashtra’s busiest corridors.
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Touted as an “engineering marvel,” the project’s scale was brandished in the inauguration. A global effort had come together to make the project possible, said Fadnavis, recounting the expertise and brains behind it had come from Copenhagen, Austria, Singapore, Canada, Taiwan, and more.
The tunnels received the stamp of the Guinness World Record, certifying them as the world’s widest underground tunnels at 22.3 metres wide, thanks to the solid rock strata in the Sahyadari’s. The excavation of the tunnels — 1.6km long and 8.9km long — required the construction of temporary adits, excavation of over 85 lakh tonnes of rock, 7,600 tonnes of steel, and 3.3 lakh cubic metres of concrete. The tunnels took nine million manhours to build, said officials from Navayuga, the contractor behind the tunnels.
The cable-stayed bridge over the Tiger Valley, claimed to be India’s tallest, stretches 182 metres at its highest and is able to withstand violent winds of 240 km/hr, tested against the force of cyclones. Narrow ridges giving little room for heavy machinery, chaotic wind speeds swaying from one extreme to another, intense monsoons resulting in water cascading and sudden bouts of fog, were some of the challenges faced by Afcons Infrastructure in building the bridges.
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