India, April 7 -- In a major step towards reducing frequent damage to essential services, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has decided to deploy Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology to map underground utilities before undertaking road excavation work.

The initiative comes in response to a growing number of incidents across the city where digging activities have led to damage of water pipelines, electricity cables, gas lines, drainage networks, and internet infrastructure due to the lack of accurate location data.

At present, multiple government and private agencies carry out road digging after obtaining permissions from PMC. However, in the absence of precise underground utility maps, excavation is often done on a trial-and-err...