Goregaon-Mulund Link Road: Mumbai's New East-West Lifeline

For as long as most Mumbaikars can remember, the city has grown in a straight north-south line, hemmed in by its rail corridors, while the journey from east to west has remained an exercise in patience. Mumbai has always grown along its rail corridors, with north-south movement baked into the city's DNA, but east-west has always been the bottleneck. The Goregaon-Mulund Link Road, or GMLR, is the infrastructure project built to answer that old frustration, and in 2026 it is finally moving from paper and promise into visible, tunnelled reality.

At its heart, the 12.2-km Goregaon-Mulund Link Road aims to create a high-speed east-west corridor across Mumbai, connecting Goregaon to Mulund. It is a 12.2 km multi-modal infrastructure project that includes flyovers, a twin tunnel bored under Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and integration points with the Metro 2A network. Its most critical feature is the 6.65-km twin-tunnel system running beneath Sanjay Gandhi National Park, with depths ranging from 20 to 160 metres. The GMLR project carries an estimated total cost of Rs 14,000 crore, of which Rs 6,600 crore has been pegged for underground tunnel excavation. Separated by 300 metres, the twin tunnels will feature six vehicular lanes and incorporate modern safety and utility features, including CCTV surveillance and an advanced fire-fighting system.

Construction has entered its most decisive phase yet. A launch shaft is currently under construction at the GMLR site to deploy the Tunnel Boring Machine, which was imported from Japan and is now being assembled. Unlike the Mumbai Coastal Road Project, which used one TBM for two tunnels, the GMLR will employ two separate TBMs to simultaneously excavate the twin tunnels. At Dadasaheb Phalke Chitranagari in Goregaon, the launching shaft for the tunnel boring machines was completed, with the TBM lowered into the shaft in early March 2026. Civic officials have been unambiguous about the urgency: Additional Municipal Commissioner Abhijeet Bangar has directed officials that tunnel excavation should begin on-site by June.

The payoff for commuters is substantial. The 12.2-km GMLR will connect the Western Express Highway at Goregaon with the Eastern Express Highway at Mulund, cutting travel time from 75 to 25 minutes. That single statistic explains why real estate analysts are watching this project as closely as civic engineers are. Historical data from JVLR and SCLR shows properties near link road access points appreciated 15-25% within 3 years of completion. Real estate analysts project 8-15% property price appreciation in GMLR-connected zones over the next 2-3 years.

Developers active in the corridor are equally vocal about the shift underway. Nishant Deshmukh, Founder and Managing Partner of Sugee Group, has said that with improved east-west connectivity, Mulund will attract homebuyers looking for better commute options, and the reduction in travel time will enhance its appeal for professionals working in Goregaon, Malad, and Andheri. Navin Makhija, Managing Director of The Wadhwa Group, has called the GMLR a strategic infrastructure initiative that will not only alleviate traffic pressure on the Western Express Highway but also catalyse real estate growth in the eastern suburbs. He also expects a firming up of property prices in the East, which are currently around 60-65 per cent of the West, eventually bridging the gap.

What makes this story particularly close to home for Oberoi Realty's own residents is geography. The corridor's western approach runs directly past Oberoi Garden City in Goregaon East, home to the Elysian towers, while its eastern reach opens onto Mulund West's LBS Marg, where Eternia and Enigma already stand as some of the tallest residential towers in the eastern suburbs. In fact, an earlier iteration of the plan noted that the six-lane road would start at Oberoi Mall, run beneath Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and end at the Eastern Express Highway beyond Nahur station, with no negative impact on the biodiversity of the park. That detail underscores just how central this stretch of Mumbai's western suburbs already is to the city's next big infrastructure story.

The tunnel's engineering has also been designed with the park's ecology in mind. To cause minimal disturbance to wildlife, the GMLR does not include above-ground ventilation shafts within Sanjay Gandhi National Park. The Centre has approved forest land diversion for the tunnels, clearing a major regulatory hurdle, and the project now sits alongside the Coastal Road, the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, and the expanding Metro network as one of the defining pieces of the city's connectivity overhaul. Within this broader context, the GMLR occupies a unique position as the only project directly addressing the east-west divide in the northern suburbs, impacting the more than 5 million people living between Goregaon and Mulund.

For homebuyers weighing a purchase along this stretch today, the calculus is straightforward: Phase-1 of the Goregaon-Mulund Link Road is likely to become operational by 2026, with BMC expecting to open the flyover structure to the public by May after finishing ancillary works, while the full GMLR project, estimated at Rs 14,000 crore, has 2028 as BMC's target year for full completion. The tunnels beneath the forest will take a little longer, but the direction of travel — for traffic and for property values alike — is now unmistakable.