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India’s urban mobility crisis persists despite major infrastructure spending, underscoring the need for a specialised urban transport service cadre to strengthen governance, coordination, and long-term planning
India’s cities are facing a severe mobility crisis. According to the TomTom Traffic Index 2024-25, major Indian metropolitan cities rank among the most congested cities in the world, with commuters losing an average of 94 hours to traffic congestion annually. Urban transport is also a major source of fine PM2.5 particulate pollution, accounting for up to 40 percent in Bengaluru and Pune, and up to 41 percent in Delhi.
Yet, despite significant investments in metro rail, road infrastructure, and bus systems, mobility remains unsafe, unreliable, and grossly unequal. While every monsoon exposes infrastructural vulnerabilities, recurring heatwaves and extreme weather put further stress on the ageing transport systems. Private vehicle ownership is on the rise, growing by almost 10 percent annually, outpacing population growth and precipitating a decline in public transport ridership. More alarmingly, bus ridership has contracted in most major cities, further increasing congestion and shrinking last-mile access, which is critical for the poor, women, and the elderly.
These urban mobility challenges are symptomatic of an underlying governance problem. Urban transportation functions are split up among an array of agencies, including municipal bodies, state transport undertakings, traffic police, regulatory bodies, and metro corporations, each with its own specific mandates and jurisdictions, and each riddled by severe capacity constraints in sector-specific governance and technological expertise. This multiplicity has led to fragmented decision-making, a lack of institutional coordination, and a focus on short-term, project-based interventions rather than longer-term planning, hindering the establishment of an integrated urban mobility system.
This article recommends establishing a dedicated, city-level Urban Transport Service Cadre to address the current gaps in skills, administration, governance, and management as a key policy priority to enable efficient, sustainable and user-friendly urban transportation services in India.
This scenario calls for an urgent re-examination of the institutions that govern urban transportation. This article recommends establishing a dedicated, city-level Urban Transport Service Cadre to address the current gaps in skills, administration, governance, and management as a key policy priority to enable efficient, sustainable and user-friendly urban transportation services in India.
Building dedicated administrative capacity with requisite skills and technological knowledge specifically tailored to the needs of urban transportation will enable India to overcome the inefficiencies in urban transportation, contributing to more sustainable, equitable, and liveable cities.
Urban mobility governance in India has multiple overlapping jurisdictions, leading to diluted accountability. Authority is scattered among various stakeholders at the municipal corporation, development authority, traffic police, and state public works or transport departments’ levels, not to mention the mushrooming metro rail corporations. This systemic fragmentation is further exacerbated by an over-reliance on generalist administrators or rotating engineering staff leading such institutions. Frequent transfers of such officials, coupled with a lack of specialised training, impede the accumulation of institutional memory and limit the deep domain expertise required to manage complex metropolitan transit systems.
This administrative incoherence has far-reaching effects. The current framework perpetuates policy myopia, characterised by forsaking long-term strategic planning for uncoordinated, capital-intensive infrastructure projects that capture the popular imagination but yield little systemic efficiency. More importantly, this silo approach breaks the critical, integrative link between land-use planning and transport networks, leading to urban sprawl that is inhospitable to public transit. Key elements of sustainable urbanism, viz., non-motorised transport and the optimisation of existing assets, are relegated to the background in favour of heavy engineering solutions.
By institutionalising a professional workforce with interdisciplinary competencies and balancing transport economics and behavioural science with traffic engineering and environmental assessment, India can move away from ad hoc management of its urban transportation to a holistic, data-driven mobility governance.
The need for resolving these structural gaps makes a dedicated cadre for urban transport imperative. By institutionalising a professional workforce with interdisciplinary competencies and balancing transport economics and behavioural science with traffic engineering and environmental assessment, India can move away from ad hoc management of its urban transportation to a holistic, data-driven mobility governance.
India’s generalist bureaucracy has always played an important role in nation-building. However, urban mobility has evolved from moving vehicles to moving people, a highly specialised and technically complex domain. Much of this mobility now involves data analysis, modelling, multimodal schemes, innovative mobility solutions, and a constant interface with a cross-section of stakeholders. Frequent changes of guard, with little technical know-how or interest in a particular sector, have led to stopgap solutions in fragmented projects.
In contrast, a glance worldwide shows cities with specialised transport institutions correlating with improved efficiency, safety, and sustainability. For example, Transport for London (TfL) operates as an integrated authority, responsible for planning, providing, regulating, and financing each mode. It utilises a professional staff comprising transport planners, economists, engineers, and data analysts, with clear career progression prospects, which allows talent retention and aids policymaking.
Most UMTAs remain weak advisory bodies with inadequate professional staffing, statutory authority, and financial autonomy. In many cities, they exist merely on paper with limited influence over planning, investment decisions, or service integration.
Singapore employs specialists who focus on continuous staff education in system planning, demand management, and technological adoption, resulting in smooth multimodal public transport, high user volume, and optimal demand-activated pricing. Germany’s Verkehrsverbünde brings together transport professionals to manage services, tariffs, and transport planning, enabling inter-regional network consolidation even in multi-town areas.
These examples provide valuable lessons for India to look beyond physical infrastructure and develop institutional capability and professional human capital for efficient urban transportation.
Despite several policy initiatives, India has largely missed the opportunity to create a robust institutional base for urban transport governance. For instance, the Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (UMTA) and the National Urban Transport Policy (NUTP) aimed to address fragmentation and promote coordination across agencies. In practice, however, most UMTAs remain weak advisory bodies with inadequate professional staffing, statutory authority, and financial autonomy. In many cities, they exist merely on paper with limited influence over planning, investment decisions, or service integration.
The absence of a dedicated urban transport service cadre has further weakened this arrangement and is associated with weak analysis, undue reliance on external consultants, lack of accountability, and a constant loss of institutional memory due to frequent administrative transfers. Institutionalising a professional and specialist cadre within the UMTAs, metropolitan planning committees, and state transport departments can go a long way in enhancing policy coherence, continuity, and quality of implementation across Indian cities.
Such a dedicated cadre must be a long-term institutional reform, not a temporary administrative adjustment. It must recruit professionals through specially designed national or state-level examinations focused on transport planning, engineering, economics, and urban systems. It must institute a well-structured career progression mechanism and ensure long-term postings to build institutional memory and expertise, provide training in interdisciplinary areas, including land-use planning, public finance, climate policy, road safety, and social inclusion, to meet the complex, multisectoral demands of urban mobility.
Institutionalising a professional and specialist cadre within the UMTAs, metropolitan planning committees, and state transport departments can go a long way in enhancing policy coherence, continuity, and quality of implementation across Indian cities.
The government must ensure that the cadre is city-focused, with deployments in metropolitan and million-plus cities facing acute mobility challenges. Performance-based accountability mechanisms linked with measurable outcomes such as shifts in modal share, safety improvements, emission reductions, and accessibility gains must be instituted. These clear measures will ensure that professional expertise results in tangible public benefits.
Beyond mere institutional efficiency, the creation of a dedicated urban transport cadre has enormous implications for sustainability and social equity. Transport professionals trained in sustainability-oriented planning are more likely to emphasise public transport, walking and cycling, and demand management strategies over car-centric infrastructure expansion. Such a shift is at the heart of the endeavour to reduce transport-related emissions, improve urban air quality, and help India achieve its climate commitments.
At the same time, professionalised transport governance can enable greater accessibility for women, older people, and low-income groups by embedding equity considerations into planning and service delivery. Improved institutional capacity can also contribute meaningfully to better road safety outcomes, an area where India continues to underperform despite repeated policy commitments, by enabling evidence-based interventions, consistent enforcement strategies, and safer street design.
Overall, India’s urban transport challenges stem less from financial or policy constraints and more from insufficient institutional depth and professional capacity. Establishing a dedicated urban transport cadre would thus facilitate a shift from project-driven approaches to system-oriented governance, enabling long-term planning, knowledge continuity, and effective responses to emerging mobility challenges.
Nandan H Dawda is a Fellow with the Urban Studies programme at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dr Nandan H Dawda is a Fellow with the Urban Studies programme at the Observer Research Foundation. He has a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and ...
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