Karnataka's Greater Bengaluru Development Minister walked the completed MG Road–Shivajinagar underground tunnel on Saturday and told BMRCL to start trial runs in September — while officials on the same inspection couldn't explain who had dug up a road along the route.
Karnataka's Greater Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda physically walked the Pink Line's underground tunnel between MG Road and Shivajinagar on Saturday, August 22, alongside Shivajinagar MLA and fellow minister Rizwan Arshad, Bengaluru Central MP P.C. Mohan, and BMRCL Managing Director P.C. Jaffer. Coming out of the inspection, Gowda instructed BMRCL to begin trial runs on this underground stretch starting in September 2026 — the first specific timeline given for train movement on this section of the corridor.
What's finished, what's left
According to the minister's own account of the walkthrough, civil construction and track-laying on the MG Road–Shivajinagar underground stretch are complete, and traction work has been finished up to Shivajinagar. What remains is the systems layer that turns a finished tunnel into an operating railway: air-conditioning and ventilation, the Environmental Control System, cabling, electrical and mechanical works, and platform screen doors — frameworks for the screen doors have already been erected to connect to maintenance rooms.
A trial run date — and a pothole nobody owned up to
The trial run Gowda has ordered would run trains from Jayadeva Hospital station — the Yellow Line interchange at the Pink Line's southern end — towards MG Road, effectively testing continuous movement across both the already CMRS-inspected elevated Bannerghatta Road section and the underground stretch beyond it. It's the kind of end-to-end test that typically comes late in a metro corridor's commissioning process, after individual sections have cleared their own inspections.
The same site visit produced a less flattering headline: according to The News Minute's coverage of the inspection, civic agencies present were unable to tell the minister who had dug up a road along the corridor — a small but pointed reminder that Bengaluru's metro construction still runs alongside the city's usual coordination gaps between BMRCL, BBMP, and utility departments, even as the project nears completion.
The bigger underground timeline
MG Road–Shivajinagar is just one piece of a much longer underground puzzle. Gowda said the remaining underground stretch — a 13.75-kilometre run from Tavarekere to Nagawara — will need another six to seven months of work, putting the full underground section on track for a March 2027 opening. That lines up with what BMRCL had already indicated back when the Pink Line's elevated Bannerghatta Road section completed its CMRS inspection in mid-August: the underground leg through Jayanagar was targeted for later in 2026, with the complete 18.8-km corridor operational by March 2027.
For now, the elevated section — six stations from Kalena Agrahara to Tavarekere — is still waiting on its own final piece: the Independent Safety Assessment certificate for the CBTC signalling system, without which the Commissioner of Metro Railway Safety can't issue passenger-operations clearance. Saturday's underground walkthrough doesn't change that timeline, but it does mark the first time BMRCL has been given a concrete month to start moving trains through the tunnel that will eventually connect Bengaluru's Central Business District straight through to the rest of the Pink Line.
Sources
- Oneindia News — "Namma Metro Pink Line Set To Open Soon? Minister Reviews 21-Km Corridor Work" (Aug 22, 2026)
- The News Minute — "Who dug up the road? Bengaluru agencies clueless during Krishna Byre Gowda's inspection" (Aug 2026)
- TV9 Kannada — coverage of the same Aug 22 MG Road–Shivajinagar underground inspection