Economic Survey 2025-26: High, rising mobility costs evident; RRTS expansion offers hope

Highlighting the high loss of productivity owing to mobility issues, the Economic Survey 2025-26, released on Thursday (January 29, 2026) noted that solving the challenge of moving the most people requires prioritising modes with the greatest carrying capacity, across short and long distances.

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“In estimates, it is evident that the costs of mobility issues are high and on the rise,” the Survey notes, citing studies from various research institutes tabulating the loss in productivity owing to traffic congestion. A Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) report on Delhi’s congestion places the productivity loss for an unskilled worker at between ₹7,200-₹19,600 per year, and for a skilled worker at between ₹8,300-₹23,800. For a highly skilled worker, congestion-related productivity losses may rise up to between ₹9,000-₹25,900 a year.

The Survey cites a working paper by the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) which adds another dimension: loss of productive hours. Late arrivals due to traffic congestion amounted to around 7.07 lakh hours for Bengaluru in 2018, translating to a monetary cost of around ₹11.7 billion. A similar report in 2018 by Uber-BCG pegged estimated costs due to traffic congestion in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata at around $22 billion per year.

Economic Survey 2025-26

“When transportation systems are inadequate, the city’s vitality diminishes—congestion, pollution, noise, and reduced productivity emerge as symptoms of decline,” the Survey notes.

It identifies a growing dependence on private vehicles as the key underlying issues. “The vital signs of our cities are poor because roads are used more as storage for vehicles rather than corridors for people,” it notes, stating that streets were not congested because of high citizen movement, but rather due to cars with low-occupancy.

It stresses the need for high-capacity public transport, and also notes the need for safety first and last-mile access through walking, cycling and shared feeders. Also important are demand-based parking and “transit-oriented development to reallocate scarce urban space from storage to movement.” it notes. “Where these conditions hold, private vehicles revert to an option, not a compulsion,” it adds.

The Survey points to a need to design cities to “prioritise the movement of people, not vehicles.” It quotes the National Urban Transport Policy of 2014 which pushes for policy to recognise that “people occupy centre stage in our cities, and all plans should aim for their common benefit and well-being.”

The survey states that a lack of viable alternatives for private vehicular use is what causes congestion and allied issues, “as citizens compete for limited road space using geometrically inefficient transport modes.”

It points to the expansion of mass rapid transit as a plus, with around 1,036 km of Metro/RRTS [Regional Rapid Transit System] operational across around 24 cities. A total of 1,036 km of Metro/RRTS are operational across around 24 cities. The first Delhi–Ghaziabad–Meerut Namo Bharat RRTS corridor has been cited as an encouraging example, reducing travel times between Delhi and Meerut to less than an hour over the 1.5 to two hours it takes via road.

The corridor has also been folded into plans for India’s first statutory implementation of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), with greenfield townships planned in New Meerut and New Ghaziabad around RRTS stations. The expansion of labour market has also been cited as a benefit; while construction generated around 166 lakh mandays between 2019 and 2025, operations will reportedly generate 12 lakh mandays a year.

The Survey notes that nearly 2,900 km of potential Namo Bharat RRTS corridors have been identified across regional clusters such as Bengaluru–Mysuru–Tumakuru–Hosur, Chennai–Vellore–Villupuram–Chengalpattu and Hyderabad–Warangal.