India’s cities are expanding faster than the transport systems meant to serve them, and women are paying the highest price for that gap. As urban employment, education and caregiving responsibilities draw more women into public space, the quality, safety and reliability of urban mobility increasingly determine whether they can participate in the economy at all. Yet transport planning in India continues to treat mobility as an infrastructure problem, measured in buses, metro lines and last-mile connectivity, rather than as a question of who the system is designed to serve. For women, whose travel patterns rarely fit the peak-hour commute that most transit networks were built around, the result is a daily negotiation between necessity and risk that keeps many at home.
India’s first National Household Travel Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office between July 2025 and June 2026, now gives this argument an empirical foundation. Covering more than 4.92 lakh households and over 20 lakh individuals across 14,274 villages and 10,377 urban blocks, it finds that 21.7 per cent of urban women who travel more than a kilometre to work rely primarily on buses, compared with 6.9 per cent of urban men. It also finds that 61.9 per cent of male workers undertake daily work trips of more than one kilometre, compared with only 41.9 per cent of women.
Women are thus far more dependent on public transport than men, yet the services they depend on are frequently infrequent, overcrowded and poorly connected to the places they actually need to reach. When the system fails them, the cost is not merely inconvenience; it is foregone education, foregone employment and a narrower life.
National Household Travel Survey, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
The invisible commute
The standard commute assumes a linear journey in which a person leaves home in the morning, travels to work and returns in the evening. Women’s travel rarely follows this pattern. inconvenience. India’s female workforce participation remains far below its potential, and restricted mobility is one of the practical constraints that keeps it there.
Estimates cited in recent policy discussions suggest that closing the gap between women’s and men’s workforce participation could have added nearly $2.9 trillion to India’s GDP over the past decade. Transport is not the only barrier, but unlike social norms or workplace discrimination, it is one that public policy can alter directly through investment, regulation and service design.
Because women continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of domestic and caregiving work, their journeys are frequently chains of short trips: dropping a child at school, visiting a health centre, buying provisions, accompanying an elderly relative and only then reaching a workplace. Transport researchers describe this as trip-chaining, and it is precisely the kind of travel that peak-hour, single-destination transit systems are poorly equipped to serve.
These journeys are often shorter, more frequent and spread across the day, which means women spend more time waiting, walking, changing modes and negotiating unsafe streets. When buses are infrequent, when real-time information is absent, and when the final stretch between a metro station and home is poorly lit or served only by costly autorickshaws, the burden falls most heavily on those with the least ability to opt out. A woman may choose a safer but more expensive route, travel at an inconvenient hour, or abandon the trip altogether.
In each case, the city extracts a price that is rarely recorded in transport budgets. For many women, safety determines whether a journey happens at all, because the fear of harassment influences decisions about night shifts, late classes, distant colleges and jobs that require long commutes. Women may decline opportunities that would improve their incomes or careers because the route to those opportunities feels unsafe. The result is a quiet form of exclusion: not a formal barrier written into law, but a daily calculation that narrows education, employment and public life.
The economic cost
The consequences extend well beyond individual The newest travel data strengthens the case for treating women’s mobility as an economic priority rather than a welfare add-on. Urban women who commute to work spend less on transport than men on average, with male workers spending ₹835 a month on fixed-workplace travel compared with ₹533 for women. Their greater reliance on buses reflects both affordability and limited access to private vehicles.
While 52.3 per cent of urban workers use two-wheelers as their primary mode of commuting, women are far more likely to depend on public transport. Any deterioration in bus services therefore hits women first, and any improvement in frequency, reliability and safety can expand their access to work.
National Household Travel Survey, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
This is why fare-free bus travel for women has become such an important, if incomplete, intervention. Delhi introduced free travel for women on DTC and cluster buses in 2019, and women’s share of daily bus ridership rose from 33 per cent in 2019-20 to 42 per cent in 2022-23. Karnataka’s Shakti scheme produced a sharp increase in women’s bus use in Bengaluru, while Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Punjab and several other states have adopted similar measures. These schemes demonstrate that when the financial barrier is removed, latent demand becomes visible: many women were not unwilling to travel, but were unable to afford or justify the cost of doing so.
Affordability is not Access
Yet free travel alone cannot deliver urban mobility. A waived fare does not help if buses pass women by, arrive overcrowded, or become sites of harassment. It does not solve the absence of safe footpaths, inadequate lighting, unreliable schedules or the lack of secure interchanges. A free bus that cannot be boarded with dignity offers a subsidy without access. The Delhi experience makes this clear: while women’s ridership increased substantially, commuters continued to report overcrowding, long waits and safety concerns that no fare waiver could address.
The broader stakes are considerable because public transport use in India is projected to decline sharply over the coming decades, with consequences for congestion, air quality, energy use and carbon emissions. If buses and metros are to remain viable, they must serve the people most likely to use them consistently. Women are not a niche constituency within public transport; they are central to its future. Designing urban mobility around their needs is therefore not special treatment, but sound transport policy.
Shared mobility must also become part of the solution rather than an informal afterthought. Shared autos, e-rickshaws, shuttles and app-based services often provide the first and last mile that formal transit fails to reach, and women are particularly dependent on these intermediate services. Research on last-mile connectivity has found that 79 per cent of women use shared mobility compared with 62 per cent of men, while 23 per cent of respondents identified poor first- and last-mile links as a reason for avoiding public transport.
Udaiti, Bridging Gendered Gaps in First and Last Mile Connectivity
India does not lack examples of what gender-responsive shared mobility can look like. Hyderabad’s SHE Shuttle programme has provided safe last-mile connectivity for women working in the city’s IT corridor, with services equipped with CCTV, panic buttons and women security personnel. Delhi has reserved electric autorickshaw permits for women drivers, Surat has piloted women-driven auto services, and Bhubaneswar has experimented with disaggregated ticketing to understand who uses transit and how. These initiatives differ in scale and success, but together they show that interventions work when they begin with women’s actual travel patterns rather than with an abstract, average commuter.
Three reforms are necessary
Scaling these efforts requires three institutional changes that Indian transport planning has yet to institutionalise. The first is data, because most transit agencies still do not routinely collect or publish ridership information disaggregated by gender, trip purpose or time of day. Without such data, planners design for an average user whose travel pattern matches neither women’s caregiving responsibilities nor the reality of multiple, linked journeys.
A standard gender audit framework, applied across cities, would reveal where women are being left behind and where investment would produce the greatest return. The second is a mandate, because gender responsiveness cannot remain a Women’s Day announcement or an isolated pilot. It must be embedded in state and national mobility plans, with measurable targets, budgetary allocations and accountability mechanisms.
The gaps appear in route planning, fare structures, lighting, staffing, interchange design and the provision of clean toilets, crèches and safe waiting areas. They will persist as long as equity is treated as an afterthought rather than as a requirement of public infrastructure. The third is representation, because women remain a small minority of the transport and logistics workforce globally, and systems designed largely by men tend, without deliberate correction, to reflect the priorities and experiences of that workforce.
India’s investment in mass transit and electric mobility offers a rare opportunity to change this. Public procurement can require women’s employment in electric bus operations, depots and manufacturing; cities can train and promote women transport professionals; and transit authorities can bring women into planning and decision-making rather than confining them to front-line roles. The recent guidelines issued by the National Commission for Women for app-based and digital transport services also point in the right direction.
They call for verified driver pools, gender-sensitisation training, route-deviation alerts, safe-drop options, emergency response systems and time-bound grievance redressal. Such measures recognise that safety must cover the entire journey, from booking to drop-off, rather than ending at the moment a ride is confirmed.
The New Indian Express, National Commission for Women guidelines
A test of viksit bharat
India’s urban future will be decided not only by the speed of its metros or the number of electric buses it procures, but by whether its urban mobility systems make room for those who have historically been made to wait. A woman’s ability to take a night class, accept a better job, visit a hospital or simply move through her city without fear is not a peripheral concern.
It is a measure of whether urbanisation is producing opportunity or reproducing exclusion. Indian women are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for an urban mobility system that recognises that their journeys are different, their constraints are real, and their participation in the economy depends on whether the city will carry them. A Viksit Bharat that leaves half its population negotiating every trip as a compromise has not yet earned the name. The true test of a modern transport system is not how quickly it moves those who already have options, but whether it makes room for those who have been standing at the stop.
*Amrendra Pratap Singh is a Public Policy Scholar pursuing an M.A. in Public Policy and Governance at Ambedkar University Anjali Singh is a Political Science scholar pursuing an M.A. in Political Science at Hindu College, University of Delhi.
