How Zomato, Swiggy transactions led parents to woman’s decomposed body in Pune flat: ‘Thought she was studying MBA in London’

PUNE: A 34-year-old woman who had gone to London to pursue an MBA but secretly returned to India without informing her family was found dead in a rented apartment in Pune’s Gahunje area, with her death remaining a mystery.Mugdha Deshmukh, a native of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, had left for the UK in July 2025. She returned to India in August but continued communicating with her parents through phone calls and messages, making them believe she was still in London.Her family became concerned after they were unable to contact her following their last conversation on October 23. When they approached her friend in London, they learnt that Mugdha had left the UK around the end of August.Her father, Avinash Deshmukh, subsequently checked her bank statements and discovered transactions on food delivery and online service platforms, including Zomato, Swiggy and Blinkit, between October 8 and 25. The transactions suggested that she was in India.The family approached the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar crime branch, which traced her location to the Lodha Belmondo residential complex in Gahunje, near Pimpri Chinchwad.Senior police inspector Devendra Chavan of Shirgaon police said officers reached the flat and gained entry with the help of a keymaker. Mugdha’s body was found inside the apartment in a highly decomposed state.Police said there were no visible injury marks on the body. Her postmortem has been conducted, and viscera samples have been preserved for chemical analysis to establish the cause of death. Further investigation is underway.During the investigation, police learnt that Mugdha had rented the apartment in April but began living there only after returning from the UK in August.Investigators also found that she rarely interacted with other residents of the housing society and lived alone. According to Chavan, she had told her domestic help that she was leaving the flat and asked her to stop coming to work.The circumstances that led Mugdha to return to India without informing her family, as well as the cause of her death, remain unclear.