Traffic on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and the old Mumbai-Pune Highway was suspended in both directions early Monday after a landslide damaged a retaining wall on the Missing Link, the recently opened bypass through the Sahyadri hills, following heavy overnight rain.
The wider expressway is among the busiest inter-city corridors in the country. This missing link is a part of the larger Mumbai Pune expressway, which is also known as Yashwantrao Chavan Expressway. In May 2026, the five plazas together logged just over 54.1 lakh vehicle transactions and collected close to Rs 142.2 crore in toll fees, before adjustments. Khalapur Main, the largest of the plazas, alone accounted for nearly Rs 68.7 crore of that total from about 24.5 lakh vehicles, followed by Talegaon at roughly Rs 60.8 crore from about 23.2 lakh vehicles. Kusgaon, Shedung and Khalapur Ramp made up the rest.
Landslide shuts Missing Link: MSRDC monitoring situation
The State Highway Police said the landslide occurred near the exit of the first tunnel on the Pune-to-Mumbai carriageway of the Missing Link, also called the Connecting Link, and damaged the retaining wall at the site. The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) said it had put a traffic diversion in place from 4 am as a precaution and was coordinating with the highway police to monitor the situation.
On the old highway, a fallen tree brought down a power line, forcing its closure as well, while some stretches saw knee-deep waterlogging. “Traffic in both directions…has been stopped until further notice,” the State Highway Police said, asking commuters not to travel between the two cities unless the journey was unavoidable. MSRDC, in a social media appeal, asked citizens to defer travel and follow official advisories until conditions were declared safe.
The disruption backed up traffic elsewhere on the route. A motorist travelling from Sangli told PTI he had been stuck near Lonavala since 4 am after diverting via the town once the Missing Link closed, and was now caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the expressway’s Lonavala stretch. The highway police control room said the Khandala Ghat section of the expressway was also disrupted by waterlogging and a separate landslide.
Missing Link: A bypass barely two months old
The Missing Link is a 13.3-km, eight-lane bypass connecting Khopoli and Kusgaon that opened on May 1, just over nine weeks before Monday’s closure. It replaced the Lonavala-Khandala ghat section of the 94-km expressway, cutting the route by about 6 km and travel time by roughly 25-30 minutes, according to MSRDC.
The bypass runs through two tunnels, 1.68 km and 8.87 km long, and a 650-metre cable-stayed bridge 182 metres above the valley floor, cut through the basalt rock of the Sahyadri range. Construction, carried out with Navayuga Engineering Company among the contractors, involved excavating more than 8.5 million tonnes of rock and pouring over 110,000 cubic metres of shotcrete and 220,000 cubic metres of pavement-quality concrete. As per media reports, the project cost approximately Rs 6,700 crore.
One of the two tunnels had been certified only weeks earlier by Guinness World Records as the widest underground tunnel in the world, at 22.33 metres across five lanes.
Mumbai-Pune Expressway: Traffic and toll collection in June
Toll collection data filed by the operator gives a sense of the volumes and revenue flowing through the corridor’s five plazas, Khalapur Main, Khalapur Ramp, Kusgaon, Shedung and Talegaon.
Daily filings for June 1-29 show the corridor recorded about 47 lakh vehicle transactions across the five plazas and collected close to Rs 128.3 crore in that period, translating to an average of roughly Rs 4.4 crore and about 1.6 lakh vehicle transactions a day corridor-wide. Cars accounted for the bulk of both traffic and, together with multi-axle trucks, the largest share of collections, with buses, LCVs, trucks and three-axle vehicles making up the remainder.
The operator’s filings note that FASTag vehicles crossing more than one plaza get counted at each one, so the totals reflect toll transactions rather than distinct vehicles. Passenger cars and buses have also been exempted from tolls at YCEW plazas since August 2025 under the state’s Electric Vehicle Policy, with the foregone revenue recorded separately as an amount receivable from the concessionaire rather than as a fee collected.
What happens now
MSRDC and the highway police have said further updates on the reopening of the Khopoli-Kusgaon stretch and the old highway will follow weather conditions. Based on when and how much they improve. The routes are likely to be inspected and cleared. Separately, before Monday’s closure, MSRDC had already been planning to widen the original six-lane expressway to 10 lanes, a roughly Rs 5,000-crore project unrelated to the Missing Link itself, expected to begin after this year’s monsoon.