PIB TrackerIndia commutes on two-wheelers: 42.6 per cent of workers, metro 5 per cent
The first all-India household travel survey covered 4.92 lakh households and 20.34 lakh persons, and put a worker’s monthly commute cost at Rs 785.
What happened
- The National Statistics Office released the first National Household Travel Survey, run July 2025 to June 2026.
- Coverage: 14,274 villages, 10,377 urban blocks, 4,92,023 households and 20,34,371 persons; a trip means one kilometre or more.
- Two-wheelers are the largest work mode at 42.6 per cent (52.3 per cent urban); metro, suburban rail, monorail and trams together are 5.0 per cent of urban worker commutes.
- 61.9 per cent of male workers against 41.9 per cent of female workers make a work trip over a kilometre.
- Monthly commuting cost: Rs 785 a worker (Rs 1,044 urban, Rs 612 rural; Rs 835 men, Rs 533 women) and Rs 443 a student.
For Prelims
- National Household Travel Survey: conducted by the National Statistics Office under MoSPI, July 2025 - June 2026, the first all-India survey of household travel, with the Ministry of Railways’ data requirements built in.
- The one-kilometre rule: only trips of 1 km or more are counted. Every shorter journey - most walking, most of the trips women make - is outside the survey by definition, which is the first thing to say about any of its mode shares.
- Travel day: defined as 3:00 AM to 2:59 AM the next day, so a late-night return is attributed to the day the trip began.
- Overnight trip: away from home for more than 24 hours and at least 50 km - the distance condition is why short overnight stays nearby do not appear.
- Primary mode: the mode used for the longest distance in a trip. A walk-plus-bus journey is recorded as a bus trip, which systematically understates walking and feeder modes.
- Current Weekly Status: the activity-status measure used to classify workers and students here, counting a person as employed if they worked at least one hour on any day in the preceding seven.
- Mode share: the proportion of trips by each mode. It is the basic input to transport planning, and until this survey India had it city by city rather than nationally.
- Why bus dominates overnight travel: 55.8 per cent by bus against 17.7 per cent by inter-city rail, because bus networks reach where railway lines do not and need no advance booking.
For UPSC: The first national numbers on how Indians actually travel, which makes it the evidence base for everything written about urban transport, metro investment, road safety and women’s mobility. The two-wheeler share, the 5 per cent mass transit share and the 20-point gender gap are the three figures worth memorising; the one-kilometre cut-off is the caveat that goes with all of them.
What it is NOT: The survey records only trips of a kilometre or more, so the shortest journeys - disproportionately walking, and disproportionately women’s - are excluded by construction, and the gender gap it reports is partly a definition. Primary mode is the longest leg, which understates walking and feeder trips in every multimodal journey. No distance data is reported in the key indicators, only time and cost, so speed cannot be computed. No vehicle ownership, no income cross-tabulation and no accident or safety data, which is what a 42.6 per cent two-wheeler share most urgently raises. And no city-level estimates, only State-level, which is the level at which urban transport is actually planned.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.9 · GS3.1 · Linkage L1
Anchor
The National Statistics Office has released the first all-India household travel survey, covering 4,92,023 households and 20,34,371 persons across 14,274 villages and 10,377 urban blocks between July 2025 and June 2026. Its headline finding is that the two-wheeler is how India gets to work: 42.6 per cent of workers travelling to a fixed workplace, rising to 52.3 per cent in urban areas.
Substantiation (data)
Against that, monorail, metro, suburban rail and trams together carry 5.0 per cent of urban worker commutes nationally, concentrated in Maharashtra at 20.7 per cent, West Bengal at 16.5 and Delhi at 14.4. Students walk: 37.0 per cent on foot, 29.5 per cent by bus, 15.8 per cent by bicycle. Journeys are short - 25 minutes on average for a worker, 23 for a student - and cost Rs 785 and Rs 443 a month respectively, with the urban worker paying Rs 1,044 against the rural worker’s Rs 612.
Position
Two figures together describe the transport problem. Mass transit carries one urban commuter in twenty while the private two-wheeler carries more than half of them, and metro capital spending over the past decade has been among the largest infrastructure commitments the country has made. The explanation is not that metros are unused but that they exist in a handful of cities and serve corridors; a national mode share is the wrong instrument to judge them by, and it is exactly the instrument policy debate usually reaches for.
Counterpoint
The survey’s own definition shapes its most quoted result. Only trips of a kilometre or more count, and the primary mode is whichever leg is longest. Both rules work against walking, against feeder trips and against short journeys - which are disproportionately the journeys women make. The reported gender gap of 61.9 per cent against 41.9 per cent is therefore partly a measurement decision, and the Rs 835 against Rs 533 spending gap follows from it rather than independently confirming it.
Way forward
The missing variable is distance. Time and cost are published but not kilometres, so nothing here yields speed, and speed is what a transport intervention changes. Adding distance, vehicle ownership and an income cross-tabulation would turn a description into a planning instrument. The other gap is geographic: estimates stop at State level, and urban transport is planned city by city.
Conclusion
A genuinely new and carefully built dataset, and the most important thing in it is uncomfortable. More than four workers in ten reach their workplace on a two-wheeler, in a country where that is also the most dangerous way to travel - and the survey that establishes the share collects nothing at all on safety.
Deploys into: Urban transport and mass transit investment · Women’s mobility and labour force participation · Statistical capacity and survey design · Road safety and two-wheeler dependence
Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation · 2026-10-05 · PRID 2319180 · PIB source ↗