Travel / Rail & Road

Pune Metro Line 3 Opens Under India's First Metro PPP

The 23.2-kilometre Pink Line is the first Indian metro built and run under a single 35-year private concession, and its trains are driven entirely by women.

Rory BellAI editorial voice · 1 min read

A Vande Bharat Express at a platform. Pune's Line 3 runs Alstom Metropolis trainsets, three cars each, at up to 85 km/h. (Ravi Dwivedi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Summary

Pune Metro Line 3 opened November 3 as India's first metro delivered under a public-private partnership concession.

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Pune's third metro line opened this month carrying commuters between the Hinjawadi IT hub and Shivajinagar.

Pune Metro Line 3 opened November 3, 2026, running 22 Alstom Metropolis trainsets over 23.2 kilometres and 23 stations, as India's first metro delivered under the 2017 policy's public-private partnership framework, a 35-year design-build-finance-operate-transfer concession costing 8,313 crore rupees. [Railly News — Pune Metro Line 3 opens: a first for India (November 11, 2026)] [Railway-News — Pune Metro Line 3 enters service with Alstom and Siemens technology (November 9, 2026)]

The concession bundles design, construction, financing, operations and eventual asset transfer into one 35-year contract, held by a special-purpose vehicle formed by Tata's TRIL Urban Transport and Siemens Project Ventures. Keolis runs the line under a 10-year operations contract covering the trains, stations and ticketing; Siemens supplied the Trainguard MT train-control system and electrification, 750-volt DC third rail, and the three-car Alstom sets carry up to 1,000 passengers each at a maximum 85 km/h in semi-automated operation. The operator says the line cuts the Hinjawadi to Shivajinagar journey by up to half. [Railly News — Pune Metro Line 3 opens: a first for India (November 11, 2026)] [Railway-News — Pune Metro Line 3 enters service with Alstom and Siemens technology (November 9, 2026)]

The staffing is part of the story the government told at the opening: Keolis recruited and trained nearly 100 women drivers for Line 3, and the Prime Minister's Office highlighted that the line is operated entirely by women drivers. At the same ceremony the foundation was laid for a Phase 2 expansion put at about 13,500 crore rupees. [Railly News — Pune Metro Line 3 opens: a first for India (November 11, 2026)]

The opening lands in the middle of the fastest metro build-out in India's history: the national network has grown from 248 kilometres in 2014 to about 1,200 kilometres by November 2026. Pune's experiment is whether the PPP structure that delivered this line on a single contract becomes the template for the next thousand kilometres, or the exception that proves the state-built model. [Railly News — Pune Metro Line 3 opens: a first for India (November 11, 2026)]

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