Mind the gap

Travel survey underlines public-transport shortage

The first all-India survey on household travel, conducted by the National Statistics Office between July 2025 and July 2026, offers useful pointers for transportation and urban planners. Covering over 14,000 villages and 10,000 urban blocks, the broad findings suggest that the average Indian commuter is disproportionately dependent on personal and private transport. In other words, public transport in India is woefully inadequate in serving the needs of a burgeoning working population.

 

Only 15 per cent of workers use public transport — buses, trains, or trams. Forty-three per cent use two-wheelers and 3 per cent cars. The rest either walk — especially in rural areas — or use bicycles or cycle rickshaws. Over 57 per cent of workers travel more than 1 km to their workplace. But average commute times are relatively short — 25 minutes, on average, with 27 minutes in urban areas and 23 minutes in rural areas. The low rate of women’s workforce participation is evident in a wide gender-mobility gap, with 62 per cent of male workers undertaking daily work trips as against 42 per cent of female workers. Overall, travelling to work is an expensive proposition for the average Indian. According to the survey, workers spend roughly ₹785 a month on fixed-workplace travel, with urban workers shelling out a steep ₹1,044, compared with ₹612 for rural workers. Thus, commuting accounts for a significant proportion of average monthly wages, which stand at around ₹22,000 for regular salaried employees and ₹15,000 for the self-employed.

 

The big picture explains the skewed and inequitable process of urbanisation, where affluent suburban agglomerations and factories located on the edge of large towns and cities tend to be surrounded by shanties and slums to house the supporting workforce. The average worker cannot afford to live too far away from her or his place of work. This unbalanced pattern of urban development, whether in India’s older cities or the newer ones, is socially suboptimal. Workers are forced to live in grossly unhealthy environments, with scant access to basic necessities, side by side with middle-class and wealthy Indians. The survey, therefore, underlines the need for integrated urban planning. The provision of a safe and well-distributed transport system that radiates from city centres to the outskirts, supplemented with genuine low-cost housing, would go a long way towards expanding the ambit of employment for both men and women — a model that Mumbai and Kolkata follow — though imperfectly — with their suburban train systems.

 

The inadequacy of public transport highlighted in the survey also plays its role in the chronic problem of pollution. For overnight travel, the survey shows that buses rather than the electrified Indian railway system are the preferred mode of transport. Workers travelling more than 1 km to the workplace rely disproportionately on fossil fuel-powered two-wheelers and cars. Electric-vehicle penetration is still below 10 per cent in both categories. The resulting congestion from idling engines adds to the particulate matter, which citizens are increasingly inhaling in dangerous quantities. This first national household survey has offered practical, if obvious, tips. Its value would be enhanced if planners converted these findings into actionable policy.