How India travels: A tale of two wheels and many divides

A quarter-century ago, an advertising campaign presented the two-wheeler as a symbol of “Naye Bharat ki Nayi Tasveer”. But is the India of 2026 still commuting mainly on two-wheelers, has it moved to cars, or are more people walking? The answer depends a great deal on which states people live in, whether they are in a village or a city, and on their gender.

All three, in varying degrees, shape how people get around and how much they pay for it.Among some of the extremes featured in India’s National Household Travel Survey, in Puducherry, 92.7% of workers use a two-wheeler as their primary mode. In Nagaland, more than seven in ten walk. West Bengal has the highest published bicycle share, Ladakh stands out for buses, and Sikkim for cars. Conducted from July 2025 to June 2026, the survey covered 4,92,023 households and 18,44,179 people aged six and above.At the national level, the old two-wheeler image still rings true, though the averages hide big regional differences. Among workers who travel at least 1km to work, 42.6% mainly use a two-wheeler, 28.3% walk and 10.7% cycle. The average one-way trip to a fixed workplace takes 25 minutes, and travel costs about ₹785 a month per worker.

Rural-urban divide

Between India and Bharat, the numbers shift substantially. In rural India, workers are split almost evenly between two-wheelers at 37.1% and walking at 36.6%.

In cities, the balance tips firmly towards the engine, presumably because of longer distances. Two-wheelers rise to 52.3% and walking falls to 13.5%. Autos, buses and cars all carry a bigger share too.The metro and local-train story is overwhelmingly urban. The survey’s Train/Monorail/Tram category, which includes metro rail and suburban or local trains, carries 5% of urban workers but just 0.4% of rural ones.

In urban Maharashtra, home to Mumbai’s suburban railway, the share is 20.7%. It is 16.5% in urban West Bengal and 14.4% in Delhi, known for its metro network.The survey reports Rail separately. That category accounts for just 0.2% of workers nationally, 0.2% in rural India and 0.3% in urban India.

Students take the bus, workers take the bike

Students and workers commute very differently. In villages, 40.5% of students walk and 18.9% cycle. In cities, buses at 33.7% and autos at 14.4% play a bigger role.

Nationally, 37% of students walk, 29.5% take a bus and 15.8% cycle, while only 6.7% use a two-wheeler. Among workers, buses account for just 6.7%, exactly the share two-wheelers have among students.The contrast is sharpest in Kerala, where buses carry 72% of students but 24.9% of workers. Age changes the picture too. Students aged 15 to 29 walk far less than those aged 6 to 14, 22.2% against 47.3%, and cycle more, 21.4% against 11.9%.

Men ride, women walk

Among workers, 47.1% of men use a two-wheeler to get to work. Among women, it is 18.4%. About half of female workers, 50.6%, walk, against 24.1% of men. Women are also much more likely to take the bus, 14% against 5.3%.It would be easy to put this down to rural India, where more people walk. But the divide holds in cities too. There, 57% of male workers use two-wheelers, against 25.8% of women, while women are twice as likely as men to walk, 24% against 11.6%.

The bicycle divide is even starker in relative terms. Among workers, 12.3% of men cycle to work but only 1.7% of women do.

Yet among students, the sexes are much closer. Some 17.7% of male students cycle, against 13.4% of female students. Odisha makes the contrast particularly striking. Female students there cycle almost as often as male students, 32.8% against 34%. Among workers, though, the Odisha gap opens up. Some 25.5% of men cycle to work, against 5.8% of women.

Short commutes, steeper city bills

Most work commutes are under half an hour. Some 83.4% of workers travelling to a fixed workplace get there within 30 minutes. Students do even better, with 87.6% reaching school or college within half an hour.However, travelling in cities is much costlier. The average urban trip to work takes 27 minutes, just four more than in villages, but costs ₹1,044 a month against ₹612, about 71% more. Urban students pay about 71% more too, even though their average trip is a shade shorter, 22 minutes against 23 in villages.Even within cities, there are stark differences. Workers in urban West Bengal and urban Delhi spend about the same time getting to work, 36 and 35 minutes on average. But the urban West Bengal worker spends about ₹825 a month, while the urban Delhi worker spends about ₹2,081, roughly two and a half times as much.Urban West Bengal also has a much bigger long-commute tail. Some 13% need over an hour to commute, against 4.1% across urban India.

Hence, lower monthly spending there does not necessarily mean a quicker journey.

The work clock

Across India, 56.5% leave for work between 8am and 10am. In Mizoram and Ladakh, some 97.1% and 95.1% of commuters leave between 8am and 10am.Evenings vary even more. Across India, 31.1% leave work at 6pm or later. In Tamil Nadu it is nearly half, 48.9%, with Gujarat at 45.2% and Delhi at 44.6%. Men are more than twice as likely as women to be leaving that late, 34.1% against 16%.Take work and study out of the picture and far fewer people step out at all. On a given day, 18.7% of people aged six and above travelled at least 1km for some other reason, 23.8% of males and 13.3% of females.

They also get there differently. Among men making such trips, 40.1% use a two-wheeler, against 17.6% of women. Among women, 30.4% take an auto or e-rickshaw, against 12.7% of men. For women, autos and e-rickshaws play much the same role that two-wheelers do for men.

For long trips, the bus still rules

In the 28 travel days before the survey, 11.3% of households made an overnight trip of 50km or more that kept a member away from home for more than 24 hours. More than half of these households, 55.8%, used the bus as their primary mode.The separately reported Rail category comes next at 17.7%. Cars account for 15.1% and two-wheelers 8.8%. Another 3.3% fall under Train/Monorail/Tram. Just 0.6% travelled by air.

Few of these trips were about work. Some 70.2% of households making overnight trips travelled for socialising, communication or religious purposes.How far are people travelling? The answer is not provided in the details released so far. The survey collected trip distances, as well as information on licences, household vehicles and bus or rail passes, but none of these appears in the released estimate tables.A quarter-century after the “Naya Bharat” pitch, the two-wheeler still leads the national picture. But the survey shows how much that picture hides, and the big missing piece is how far India travels. At a time when there is demand for metros in every Tier 2 city and road and rail connectivity is better than ever, the full data, when released, will help policymakers make more informed decisions about how to prioritise India’s transport needs.