Pune Is Officially Building a "Netherworld" — Here's What's Actually Under It

Patal Lok, in the stories most of us grew up on, is the realm beneath everything — the netherworld under Prithvi (earth) and below Swarga (the heavens), home to serpent-kings and buried treasure, the place you go when you fall through the floor of the ordinary world. It's a dramatic name. So when Maharashtra's government picked it as the nickname for a Pune road project, someone in the planning department clearly has a sense of humor, or at least a sense of theatre.

The actual Patal Lok has nothing to do with serpents. It's road infrastructure, and specifically: three tunnels, none of which look anything like the others.

The three tunnels, for real

On June 11, 2026, Pune's Divisional Commissioner Shital Teli-Ugle confirmed that a Special Purpose Vehicle — a joint entity pulling in officials from the Pune Municipal Corporation, Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, and PMRDA — had been cleared to develop the tunnel network, with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis chairing the policy committee steering the whole thing. Inside that network are three distinct corridors:

• A 36-km stretch from Bhosari to the proposed new airport near Undri, with roughly 10 km of it running elevated rather than underground — this is the long-haul piece, cutting diagonally across the city to connect the industrial north with where Pune's next airport is meant to land.
• An 8-km tunnel from Ramnadi-Bhugaon to Rajaram Bridge, threading through the western hill corridor.
• A much shorter 1.65-km tunnel linking Taljai Hill to Padmavati and Hingne, aimed squarely at untangling the Sinhagad Road–Sahakarnagar traffic knot that anyone who's driven that stretch at 6pm already has strong feelings about.

Depending on which report you read, the full underground network being planned under the same umbrella runs anywhere from 54 to 64 km — the number keeps shifting as more corridors (and committees) get folded in, which is honestly a pretty normal thing for a project this size at this stage.

Still on paper, for now

Worth being straight about where this actually stands: as of this month, it's planning, not pouring concrete. Detailed project reports were slated to run from June through December 2026, and Commissioner Teli-Ugle herself was candid about it — big road infrastructure, she said, takes time to come into reality, and the priority right now is expediting planning and DPR work, not breaking ground. Routes, entry and exit points, and tunnel dimensions are all still being finalized after further study. The rationale behind the urgency is clear enough, though: Pune reportedly hosts around a quarter of India's global capability centers, yet roads make up only about 9% of the city's built-up area. Something underneath has to give.

What this means while we wait

Tunnels or no tunnels, the traffic that makes this project necessary is the traffic that exists right now — on Sinhagad Road, around Rajaram Bridge, through the Bhosari-Wagholi stretch every single evening. None of the three corridors above will be open for years. What does help today is fewer solo cars making the same commute.

That's the ordinary, unglamorous version of decongesting a city, and it's the one GoVia is built around: if you're driving from Bhugaon toward Rajaram Bridge or clearing Taljai Hill toward Hingne every day anyway, splitting that ride with a couple of neighbours doing the same commute means fewer cars stacked up at the same signals — and lets everyone in the car share the actual cost of fuel and tolls instead of each paying for a near-empty seat. No one builds a profit into it; it's just the trip, split. Pune's underworld-themed tunnel network might take years to surface. The daily grind through the traffic it's meant to fix doesn't have to wait that long to get a little lighter.