Examine how regional differences in public transport availability shape women's access to work. Suggest measures for gender-responsive urban and rural transport planning.

India's first National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) by MoSPI [2] finds that about 67% of women commuters walk or use public transport to work, against ~33% of men [1]. Because women rely more on shared and non-motorised modes, how much public transport a region has largely decides how far they can travel for work.

Regional differences and women's access to work

• Rural–urban divide: more than half of rural working women walk to work, while rural men mostly ride two-wheelers [1]. Walking distance limits women to nearby, often informal jobs.
• Weak-network States: in MP, UP and Bihar, more women walk than the national average, which points to scarce buses [1].
• Strong-network States: in Kerala, the rural–urban gap in women's bus use narrows sharply, so dense bus networks widen rural women's reach [1].
• Time poverty: in at least 13 major States, fewer women than men reach work within ~30 minutes [1]. Long commutes on top of care work push women towards closer, lower-paid jobs.
• Urban evidence: World Bank research in Mumbai links women's limited transport options to their employment outcomes [3].
• Hidden cost: the data cover only women who already commute [1]. Women who stayed out of work because there was no bus are not counted.

Measures for gender-responsive transport planning

Rural

• Add bus routes and frequency to unserved villages first. Free fares help only where buses already run.
• Treat footpaths and street lighting as core transport infrastructure [5].

Urban

• Plan for women's linked trips (school–market–work) with off-peak frequency and safe, well-lit stops, using the World Bank's how-to toolkit for Indian cities [4].
• Set up strong harassment grievance systems, hire more women frontline staff and adopt responsive fare policies, drawing on Chennai's experience [5].

Cross-cutting

• MoSPI should release State and district gender tables and repeat the NHTS so that progress can be tracked [2].
• Use gender budgeting to show how much spending goes to walking and public transport.

Where a woman lives shapes her access to work, and the NHTS shows the burden is heaviest where buses are scarce. Using this data to add routes and build safe walkways and services can make transport an enabler of women's work. This would advance SDG 5 and SDG 11.2 and the constitutional promise of equality.