Every morning, tens of millions of Indians board buses or the metro to reach their jobs or classrooms (or hospitals in some cases). Last-mile connectivity, the final leg of a journey between a transit hub and a commuter’s home or workplace, is one of the most underrated drivers of economic growth: it determines whether infrastructure investment actually translates into jobs and markets reached.
Big investments in metros and highways only pay off if people can reach them. A 2021 World Resources Institute (WRI) study found 70% of potential Bengaluru metro users avoided the system due to inconvenient access; last-mile gaps hold back ridership in Delhi as well.
That gap is stranded economic value: a worker who can’t reliably reach a station can’t reach a better job a few stops away. Because women, low-income workers and non-metro residents depend most on it, closing the gap is both a growth and equity strategy.
India’s Economic Survey 2025-26 emphasizes last-mile connectivity, recommending that shared autos, e-vehicles and buses be formally legalized.
Buses remain India’s most affordable means of closing that gap. Where India has invested in buses thoughtfully, ridership has responded, sometimes dramatically. The task ahead is to scale up what already works, because getting the last mile right is what makes every other rupee spent on roads, rail transport and metros pay off.
The clearest bright spot: women are returning to buses in large numbers. According to RedBus’s Pink Report, women’s share of intercity bus travel rose from 23% in 2019 to 33% in 2025, growing nearly twice as fast as overall ridership. Gen-Z women make up 60% of female bus passengers, and 40% of trips are solo, a sign of growing independence. This is a real demand awaiting better supply.
That said, supply has lagged demand. A nearly flat fleet hasn’t kept pace with a fast growing urban population and a rising share of existing buses sit idle. This is solvable: fleets need to expand in step with demand, not at a fraction of the rate cities do. Per the 2021 WRI study, India’s shortfall stood at 200,000 buses, 130,000 urban, costing the country ₹3.5–4.7 trillion over ten years.
The gap is worse outside India’s biggest cities. Only around 47,650 buses serve urban India and nearly 60% are concentrated in nine megacities like Delhi and Mumbai, home to just a quarter of the country’s urban population. Cities of 0.3 to 4 million, India’s fastest-growing urban tier, remain largely underserved.
The state-level picture shows where the opportunity is largest. Delhi and Karnataka already meet the benchmark of 32 buses per lakh population that researchers consider adequate. States like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, well below that line, have a clear target to work towards and other states’ experience to draw on.
Despite meeting the national benchmark, Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) shows both the risk of neglect and simplicity of the fix. DTC fares haven’t been revised since 2009, so revenue per kilometre has fallen behind rising costs. The bus operator recovers only a quarter of costs through fares, so losses pile up; it has ₹47,800 crore in unpaid interest, plus a ₹12,940 crore operating loss. Its fleet has aged too: ‘overage’ buses jumped from near-zero in 2018-19 to 45% by 2023.
Neither problem is exotic: a fare update paired with disciplined fleet replacement is well within reach. Delhi’s experience warns what happens when these levers sit untouched for a decade, and how reversible the damage still is.
Metro investment tells a similar story of unrealized potential. Ridership across ten Indian metro systems trails initial projections: Delhi reaches a strong 87% of its forecast, Lucknow just 7%, and Kanpur only 2%. Delhi achieves this despite its own ageing bus network, which suggests an upgrade would help even more people reach metro stations. Weak feeder networks explain much of the gap elsewhere and building that layer proactively would be far cheaper than laying more rail track.
Safety is a solvable design problem. Audits of Delhi’s streets show lighting and visibility score lowest, and many locations lack nearby bus stops. Safetipin’s survey of women in Bhopal, Gwalior, and Jodhpur found isolated locations (97%) and poor lighting (86%) topped concerns, ahead of overcrowding or police absence.
A safer environment could also help more women choose colleges and jobs on merit rather than perceived safety, with knock-on benefits for education and employment outcomes.
India doesn’t have to invent solutions from scratch. Seoul’s 2004 bus overhaul, reorganized routes, unified fares and single smart card nearly doubled bus speeds and cut accidents by 62% in a few years. Bogotá’s TransMilenio paired trunk corridors with feeder routes, cutting commute times by a third.
Hong Kong made its transit authority profitable by developing property around stations, a fourfold return on investment. Singapore is building pedestrian links to bring 80% of households within ten minutes of a station by 2030.
Each city started where Indian cities are today, showing that better routes, fares, feeder networks and safer streets produce results within years, not decades.
The building blocks for an upgradation of urban transport systems are visible in the data: proven demand, especially among women; a quantified investment gap; and a global playbook of proven solutions. India’s public bus systems are an undervalued asset with a clear path to becoming one of the country’s great infrastructure success stories.
In a country racing to build highways, railways and metro lines, the last mile is often the missing link for the commuter who needs public transport most. Closing these gaps is more than just a question of expanding urban amenities; given the huge difference it makes, it is a precondition for the jobs, mobility and inclusive growth that India is counting on.
Dhruv Goel from ICPP contributed to this piece.
The authors are, respectively, dean of Ashoka School of Economics, director and head of Ashoka Isaac Center for Public Policy (ICPP), and professor of economics at Ashoka University; and officer, Indian Economic Service.