01/05/2026
Hello Dear Yoga Friends!
Today, on Maharashtra Day, something quietly remarkable happened just a few hours from where many of you stay when you visit Pune. The long-awaited "Missing Link" of the Mumbai–Pune Expressway was inaugurated this morning — 1st May 2026 — by Maharashtra's Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. For most of you who have travelled the cab journey from Mumbai airport to your apartment in Pune, this small piece of news will, in time, change something familiar about that drive. Sharing a few thoughts on what it is, and why it feels worth pausing over.
For those who don't know its history — the Mumbai–Pune Expressway itself, officially the Yashwantrao Chavan Expressway, is a piece of Indian infrastructure history. When it opened in 2002, it became India's very first six-lane, concrete, access-controlled expressway. Before that, the journey between Mumbai and Pune took four to five hours along a winding, congested old highway. The expressway brought it down to about two hours — and quietly set the standard for every expressway built in India since. It cuts through the Sahyadri mountain range, the same Western Ghats you see rising in soft folds outside the cab window as you make your way up from the coast.
But there has always been one stretch — the steep, winding Bhor Ghat section near Khandala and Lonavala — where the new expressway and the older national highway briefly merge, and traffic slows to a crawl. Many of you will remember that part of the journey: the sudden green of the hills, the misty viewpoints if you are lucky with the weather, and also the long pauses, the tail lights of trucks, the monsoon landslides that occasionally close the road for hours or days. This bottleneck has been the Achilles' heel of the otherwise smooth journey for over two decades.
The Missing Link is the elegant solution to that. It is a 13.3 km, eight-lane bypass that connects Khopoli to Kusgaon, lifting traffic clean over and through the difficult ghat section — replacing a 19 km winding mountain road with a straighter, safer corridor that travels mostly through tunnels and across a striking cable-stayed bridge. Travel time on this stretch alone is expected to reduce by about 20 to 30 minutes, and the overall distance between Mumbai and Pune drops by around 6 km.
What is remarkable, though, is not just the time saved but how it has been built. The project's centrepiece is a 650-metre cable-stayed bridge across Tiger Valley near Lonavala — supported by pillars rising up to 184 metres, making it among the tallest road bridges of its kind in India. Its design deliberately uses fewer pillars so that the valley's forest ecosystem is disturbed as little as possible, and it has been engineered to withstand wind speeds of up to 252 km/h. Alongside it run two tunnels — one 1.75 km long, and the longer one stretching 8.92 km, descending to depths beneath Lonavala Lake. These tunnels are 23.75 metres wide, which makes them among the widest road tunnels in the world; the longer one is being considered for a Guinness World Record. The engineers used a method called the New Austrian Tunnelling Method to carve through the hard basalt rock of the Sahyadris, a technique that allows the rock itself to bear part of the load rather than relying entirely on concrete linings. Built at a cost of around ₹6,700 crore (roughly USD 800 million), the project has taken about seven years — partly because tunnelling beneath Lonavala Lake required extraordinary precision to avoid disturbing its waters, and partly because the heavy monsoons of the Western Ghats narrow the working window each year.
For those of us who watch Pune slowly modernise around its old, deeply traditional core, there is something quietly meaningful about a project like this. It connects two cities that hold very different rhythms — Mumbai's restless energy and Pune's older, more contemplative pace — and it does so by passing through some of the most beautiful and ecologically delicate terrain in our state. The care taken to protect Tiger Valley's forest, to tunnel without disturbing a lake, to build something that can stand for a century — these are not small things. They reflect a kind of patience that, in its own way, is not very different from the patience our own practice asks of us.
Practically speaking, those of you arriving at Mumbai airport for your next intensive at RIMYI may notice the difference. The cab journey from the airport to Pune, which has been around three hours on a good day and longer in heavy traffic, should now be smoother and a little quicker — particularly through the section that used to feel the longest. If your driver takes the new alignment, you will pass through that long, wide tunnel and over the cable-stayed bridge, with the green Sahyadri valleys falling away on either side. For those of us who have made this drive many times, it will be a new experience layered onto a very familiar one.
A small note: in the early days, only light motor vehicles and buses will be permitted on the Missing Link — heavy goods vehicles will continue to use the old ghat. There will also be the usual settling-in period that any new road needs. Reassuringly, no toll hike has been announced because of the new project. By the time most of you return to Pune for your next stay, this will simply be part of the route — quietly doing its work of making your journey here a little easier.
Wherever you are reading this from — Berlin, São Paulo, Melbourne, New York, or closer — please know that the road that brings you back to us has just become a little better cared for.
And as always, if you are planning your next intensive or a visit to Pune, do feel free to reach out — and if a friend of yours is travelling here, we would be grateful if you thought of us.
