India's first household travel survey finds two-wheelers do the daily miles
The National Statistics Office said two-wheelers account for 42.6 percent of trips by workers going to a fixed workplace. Buses take 55.8 percent of overnight journeys and inter-city rail 17.7 percent. The survey, from July 2025 to June 2026, covered 492,023 households. Male workers travel at 61.9 percent, women at 41.9 percent. A worker's average monthly commute cost is ₹785.
New Delhi2 min read
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Two-wheelers account for 42.6 percent of trips by workers who travel to a fixed workplace, the largest single mode in India's first National Household Travel Survey. Buses account for 55.8 percent of overnight journeys, and inter-city rail for 17.7 percent. Together those two public modes are 73.5 percent of overnight travel. The split is the finding: the daily commute is a private two-wheeler problem, and the journey that includes a night away is a bus and train problem.
The National Statistics Office ran the survey from July 2025 to June 2026. It covered 14,274 villages and 10,377 urban blocks, and took information from 492,023 households and about 2.03 million people. Insights on India, citing the official release, put the person count at 20.34 lakh, the same figure. It is the first dedicated national survey of household travel built to record mode, purpose, distance, duration and spending, rather than a transport chapter inside a broader consumption round.
Work and school do not look alike. About 57.6 percent of workers aged 15 and above travel more than 1 kilometre to a workplace. The urban share is 64.1 percent, the rural share 54.5 percent. Among students aged 6 and above, 66.4 percent travel at least 1 kilometre to class, and the 15-29 group is highest at 77 percent. Walking is still the largest student mode, at 37 percent, then buses at 29.5 percent and bicycles at 15.8 percent. A school transport plan copied from the worker table would over-order two-wheelers and under-count feet.
The gender gap is in the work trip, not in a slogan. The survey finds 61.9 percent of male workers making a daily work trip, against 41.9 percent of female workers. That 20-point difference is a mobility fact and a labour-force fact at the same time. It does not, by itself, say why. It does say that a road project justified only by peak male commute will mis-state who is on the road.
Money is measured. Workers spend an average of ₹785 a month getting to a fixed workplace. Urban workers spend ₹1,044. Rural workers spend ₹612. Those are commute bills, not fares for the overnight journey. A household that sends one urban worker to a fixed job is already near a thousand rupees a month before any festival trip is counted.
The policy use the statistics office named is route planning and service timing. The numbers that bite are the ones a state transport corporation can put on a depot wall: 42.6 percent two-wheeler for the daily job, 55.8 percent bus once the trip lasts overnight, 37 percent of students still walking. Anyone writing a national mobility plan off car-ownership slides will be describing a country this survey did not find.
