New data is always thrilling for us at Data For India, and we're looking at getting into the raw data from India's first survey on commuting, conducted over 2025-26. While some highlights from the survey have been shared by the government, we're only prepared to talk about it once we've spent some time with the raw data which isn't out yet. However, I'll use one apparent finding from the survey to flag three data points that I have seen that point to one major shift - the two-wheeler takeover of India - and they're all versions of the number "40%".
The first comes from my colleague Abhishek Waghmare's work for us on vehicle ownership, and it points to how widespread the ownership of scooters and motorbikes now is even among India's poorest 20%. Over 40% of India's poorest quintile (bottom fifth) now own a two-wheeler.
The second comes from my colleague Nileena Suresh's work on road accidents, and is her tragic finding that over 40% of all deaths in road accidents are of people on two-wheelers.
The third is from the yet-to-be-published National Household Travel Survey, which, we are told, finds that over 40% of workers who travel over 1 km to their workplaces use a two-wheeler to commute.
I don't want to make too much of the triple appearance of the number "40%" - the joke in journalism about two being a coincidence and three being a trend says more about journalism than it does about numbers. When the transport survey data comes out, there will be much opportunity to debate whether this high number is a choice or a compulsion. Across datasets, however, we do see that there is convergence around the fact that the shift in two-wheeler ownership has virtually no parallel in Indian households.
