Inside India’s first household travel survey

Akshara (0:04)

In today's episode, we'll do one deep dive and cover another story for the day. First, we'll look at India's first household travel survey, and then we'll talk about the Supreme Court questioning the 10X markup on cancer drugs. Welcome back to The Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I'm your host Akshara. Today is Friday, 9th October.

Before we begin, our latest episode on Subtext is with Professor Rakesh Basant, who taught economics at IIMA for over three decades, and helped found one of the first incubators of India, CIIE, from IIMA. In the episode, we talk about how innovation in India really works. The chat spans knowledge transfer between companies, how intellectual property, parents, and R&D spend function, academia-industry linkages in India, and how to put academic theory to practice. The episode is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple podcasts.

Coming to the first story.

You're probably well aware of the complaints Indians often make about the traffic jams they're trapped in while traveling to their workplace, often from metropolises like Bengaluru, Mumbai, and so on. But in India, those complaints aren't representative of the average Indian worker. Nor does the data tell the story that social media seems to paint. And if anything, the headline finding might take you aback. Most workers in India who have fixed workplaces get there in about 25 minutes. Can you believe that? That number comes from the first ever National Household Travel Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office between July 2025 and June 2026 It covers over 20 lakh people across the country. And to filter out trivial movements, the survey excluded trips under 1 km and overnight journeys shorter than 50 km.

And what emerges is an incredible repository of how India travels for work and personal reasons, and it challenges many conventional assumptions and even casual observations we make about the purpose of Indian infrastructure. And that 25-minute headline figure has a lot of nuance behind it as well. In this story, we'll be looking at some core findings across the survey and then drill down into what they mean exactly, along with some very interesting charts created by us. So the first finding is how people travel for work specifically and the role of rail in it. So over the past two decades, central and state governments have poured massive capital into modern urban transit. You can see the concrete viaducts cutting through almost every major Indian city now. Yet, mass rail transit, which includes metros, monorails, suburban rail, and trams, carries just 5% of urban commuters to their jobs. The national average for this category is 2.1%.

And even that modest number leans heavily on three places with legacy rail networks. Maharashtra at nearly 21%, West Bengal at 16.5%, and Delhi at approximately 14%.

These figures combine century-old suburban rail systems like the Mumbai Local with modern metro lines, and outside these corridors, mass rail transit hardly makes a dent. Now, the form of transport that powers daily commute the most is the humble two-wheeler. Scooters and motorcycles carry approximately 43% of all workers, and in cities alone, that share rises to approximately 52%.

Interestingly, the travel-form trailing two-wheelers at second is walking, which stands at approximately 28% nationally. Personal cars, meanwhile, carry just 3%. Now, it's tempting to read that 5% and conclude that metro investment has failed, but that misreads how transit networks mature. After all, a metro corridor is a 50-year asset. Metro ridership only picks up when a system achieves network density, linking radial lines through interchanges and connecting with reliable feeder services. An isolated corridor is useless in that sense. In many secondary cities, operational metro lines are still single-corridor stubs. So comparing a stub to a mature road network mistakes an incomplete system for a failure of demand. But planners must also reckon with commuter economics. If a worker lives 3 km from the nearest station and works 2 km from the destination platform, completing the journey requires two feeder trips on top of the train ticket. We have also covered before that one of the big reasons hindering metro adoption is the lack of easy last-mile connectivity after you exit the metro station. For millions of wage earners, that multimodal chain costs more money and time than just riding a motorcycle door to door.

The second finding is one that we mentioned earlier. The average worker takes 25 minutes to travel to their workplace. So across India, 83.4% of workers reach their fixed workplaces in under 30 minutes. In cities, the average is around 27 minutes, while in rural areas, it's 23

More than half of all commuters leave home between 8 and 10 in the morning. But is a 25-minute average a sign that Indian transport works well? Or does it signal a different malaise?