Home > 2026 > Women, Work and the Daily Commute: Insights from the NHTS | Vandana Sehgal

Mainstream, Vol 64 No 26, November 2, 2026

Women, Work and the Daily Commute: Insights from the NHTS | Vandana Sehgal

Sunday 1 November 2026

The National Statistics Office (NSO) has recently released the factsheet of its first-ever National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). The survey covers more than 4.9 lakh households for the period July 2025 to June 2026. The survey aims at providing information on how people actually move: where they travel, how far, by what means and at what cost. The factsheet highlights that two-wheelers are the single largest primary mode of transport for workers across India, accounting for 42.6% of workers (37.1% rural; 52.3% urban). Overnight trips undertaken by households are primarily for social and religious purposes, with buses being the predominant mode of transport. The average monthly expenditure on commuting to a fixed workplace is ₹785 per worker. Urban workers incur a substantially higher average monthly cost of ₹1,044, compared with ₹612 for rural workers.

The headlines so far have been about two-wheelers and buses. The more important story sits a little deeper in the tables. It is about women. Women workers are far less likely than men to travel a kilometre or more to work, spend a fraction of what men do on getting there, and rely more on the bus.

Who gets to travel to work

According to the NHTS factsheet, among workers aged 15 and above, 61.9% of male workers make a regular work trip of a kilometre or more. For women workers, the figure is 41.9%. This is a gap of 20 percentage points (pp), roughly four in ten working women travel this distance to work, against six in ten men. In rural areas, the gap is widest at nearly 22 pp as compared with under 14 pp for urban areas.

Source: NSO, NHTS 2025-26, Factsheet

However, these figures cover only women who are already employed. Even among them, only 37.7% of rural women workers make a regular work trip of a kilometre or more. The factsheet does not say where the rest work, but the likely answer is at home, on the family plot, or close enough to walk. Even rural women who do commute spend only ₹307 a month on it, less than half the ₹674 spent by rural men, which suggests shorter and cheaper journeys. Whether this reflects choice or constraint, the survey cannot tell us. But the urban figures offer a clue. In cities, where transport and jobs are generally more accessible, the share of women workers who travel to work is about 15 pp higher than in rural areas (52.9% against 37.7%), while for men the difference is only 7 pp (66.6% against 59.6%). If the gap narrows this much when travel gets easier, it cannot be only about women’s choice.

What women spend to get there

Source: NSO, NHTS 2025-26, Factsheet

The cost of trips to and from a fixed workplace reveals the same story, even more sharply. Among workers aged 15 and above, a rural man spends around ₹674 a month while a rural woman spends less than half of that (₹307). In urban areas, the gap narrows: ₹884 for women against ₹1,076 for men.

Women’s low commuting bills point to hidden realities. They likely reflect shorter trips and more walking. They also suggest that women take work close to home rather than travel to better-paid jobs further away. Put simply, women are buying less mobility. This has a broader implication: a woman who cannot afford a longer journey is, in effect, confined to a smaller job market.

Different journeys, different vehicles

According to the NHTS factsheet, the two-wheeler is the single largest mode of travel to work, used by 42.6% of workers. For men, that holds especially true: in urban areas, 57% of male workers rely on a two-wheeler as their main mode of transport. Women’s journeys look different. About 21.7% of urban women workers depend mainly on the bus, about 2.4 times the 9.2% average for all urban workers. For many women, the reach of the job market is set by the reach of the bus network. This has a bearing on how public money is allocated. Investment in roads and flyovers has clearly served the large number of two-wheeler commuters. The next step is to give equal weight to the needs of women who rely on buses: how often the bus comes, how crowded it is, and whether the walk to the stop feels safe after dark.

Women also make fewer trips of any other kind. Only 13.3% of women made a non-work, non-school trip on the reference day, against 23.8% of men. And across the population, the single biggest reason for such trips is household errands: unpaid domestic work accounts for 54.1% of them.

What the numbers can’t tell us yet

The survey leaves out trips under one kilometre. That is a sensible line for transport planning, but it hides much of women’s movement: the walk to the market, the school drop-off, the trip to fetch water. The real picture is probably more local than the factsheet shows. The unit-level data, once released, should fill some of these gaps.

Where policy should go next

None of this calls for a grand new scheme. It calls for spending that follows women’s actual journeys. Four steps would help.

  • Treat bus frequency as gender policy. If one in five urban women workers rides the bus, then more buses, shorter waits and better evening services are direct investments in women’s work.
  • Fix the walk to the stop. Street lighting, footpaths and safe last-mile options such as shared autos and e-rickshaws decide whether a bus route is usable at all.
  • Evaluate free-travel schemes with this data. Several states now offer free bus rides to women. MoSPI should publish those estimates by sex and state so the schemes can be judged on evidence.
  • Plan for rural women, not just commuters. Where the gap is widest, reliable rural bus links to block towns and markets could widen the range of jobs within reach.

India’s first household travel survey has given us a clear view of how its people move. Using it to design transport around women’s journeys could widen their access to work and, with it, their economic participation.

(Author: Dr. Vandana Sehgal, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida)

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