With Visarjan boost, Metro sees 5.90L rides on Anant Chaturdashi

The Pune Metro recorded total rides of 5.90 lakh recorded on Saturday, due to the boost given by the Ganpati visarjan in the city. This figure comes close to the total rides projected for the year 2021 in the metro’s Detailed Project Report (DPR): 6.09 lakh.

In August, before Ganeshotsav began, the number of Metro rides averaged 2.12 lakh daily.  During Ganeshotsav, this number shot up to a daily average of 3.38 lakh. The peak of this was on the last day or the visarjan, with 5,90,944 rides recorded. On Sunday, the number of again fell to 2.06 lakh.

The Pune Metro DPR had estimated total rides of 5.71 lakh per day in 2018 and 6.09 lakh per day in 2021. With delays in the Metro’s construction, the two lines were made fully operational in late 2024 with the inauguration of Swargate station. However, the Metro has been operating at less than 30 per cent of the projected total rides since then.

Chandrashekar Tambavekar, newly appointed spokesperson for Pune Metro, said, “We were expecting a ridership of around 5 to 5.5 lakh on visarjan day. A month of preparation went into handling such traffic with the existing resources. The operation team has worked very hard on this, they have to face the crowd and all the traffic. We were in continuous touch with the police and corporation administration.”

“We had asked people to get down at Kasba Peth and PMC station, and use the Mandai station for the return journey. There were no major issues reported during this rush. The metro staff have really taken a lot of effort. They were used to around 2 lakh traffic and suddenly they have handled very successfully 6 lakh traffic.”