India’s Clean Transport Push Risks Leaving Women Behind, Study Warns

India’s push toward sustainable mobility is often framed as a story of electric two-wheelers, cleaner fuels, and modern public transit. But a new study suggests that the transition may have an overlooked fault line running through it: gender. Analyzing more than 2.5 million household-month expenditure records from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, researchers Zeeshan Zeeshan, Sunil Khosla, and Pema Choden Bhutia find that gendered mobility vulnerability in India does not show up where policymakers might most expect it. Female-majority households do not, once income, household structure, and local conditions are accounted for, spend a statistically larger share of their budgets on transport than male-majority households. Instead, the disadvantage emerges through subtler channels: lower fuel spending that may reflect weaker access to private vehicles, and sharply lower ownership of the two-wheelers that anchor both everyday mobility and India’s electrification strategy.

The study, published in Frontiers in Future Transportation, links household expenditure data to Consumer Price Index inflation series and gridded climate data from the India Meteorological Department. The analytical dataset covers 2,560,351 household-month observations from 195,400 unique households across 28 states and union territories, 508 harmonized districts, and 24 monthly survey periods. Households were classified as male-majority, female-majority, or balanced based on roster counts, a transparent classification rule the authors stress is not a measure of intra-household bargaining power. The researchers then applied ordinary least squares fixed-effects regressions with district and survey-month fixed effects, survey weights, state-clustered standard errors, and Benjamini-Hochberg false-discovery-rate adjustment to guard against spurious findings across many tested outcomes.

The headline regression result is deliberately counterintuitive. In the preferred rich-control specification, the female-majority coefficient for total transport expenditure share is a negligible negative 0.024 percentage points, with a false-discovery-rate q-value of 0.364, meaning it is statistically indistinguishable from the male-majority reference group. The unadjusted descriptive statistics had told a different story: female-majority and balanced households spent 2.566 and 2.637 percent of total expenditure on transport respectively, compared with 2.209 percent among male-majority households. That apparent gap, the authors conclude, largely reflects differences in income, household structure, vehicle access, and local conditions rather than gender composition itself. Male-majority households in the sample also had higher adjusted total expenditure and total income than the other groups, underscoring how easily raw spending differences can masquerade as behavioral ones.

Where gender does matter is in the composition of transport spending. Female-majority households show a 0.355 percentage-point lower fuel share, and female-headed households a 0.584 percentage-point lower fuel share, both highly robust after multiple-testing adjustment. The authors interpret this cautiously: in a country where two-wheelers and cars provide access to work, education, healthcare, and care responsibilities, lower fuel expenditure may signal constrained access to private motorized mobility rather than environmental virtue or lower vulnerability. A household that spends little on fuel may simply have no vehicle to fuel. Supporting this reading, female adult share is strongly negatively associated with fuel share, with a coefficient of negative 2.142 percentage points, while female member share is positively associated, indicating that different gender-composition measures capture distinct dimensions of household structure.

Female headship is the one gender variable that does survive rigorous adjustment for total transport burden. Female-headed households are associated with a 0.126 percentage-point higher transport-services share, a statistically precise but substantively modest estimate. The female adult share coefficient is nominally positive at 0.184 but does not survive false-discovery-rate adjustment, and the authors treat it as suggestive rather than a principal result. This pattern aligns with gender-and-poverty scholarship cautioning against relying solely on female headship while also distinguishing household composition from headship. It suggests that gendered mobility disadvantage operates through specific structural channels rather than a blanket effect of being a female-majority household.

The welfare stakes become clearer when mobility costs are set against other essential spending. A one percentage-point higher fuel share is associated with a 0.388 percentage-point lower food share, a 0.075 percentage-point lower education share, and a 0.049 percentage-point lower health share, all significant after adjustment. Total transport share is negatively associated only with education spending, at negative 0.176 percentage points, and the authors note this association is more sensitive to functional form than the fuel results. Because all these shares share a common denominator, the researchers are careful to frame the findings as budget-composition associations rather than causal displacement. Still, the consistent negative relationship between fuel burden and essentials across both share-based and log-level specifications points to genuine affordability pressure among fuel-dependent households.

Transport poverty itself is concentrated at the bottom of the income distribution, and its incidence varies sharply by household type. In the lowest income quintile, female-majority households record the highest incidence of high transport burden at 23.365 percent, followed by balanced households at 22.618 percent and male-majority households at 12.634 percent, with identical orderings for the low-income high-cost transport poverty measure. Fuel burden tells the reverse story, rising toward the top of the income distribution, where high fuel burden reaches 22.398 percent among balanced households and 21.818 percent among male-majority households in the richest quintile. The authors argue this asymmetry vindicates using multiple indicators: low-income households with high transport shares face affordability stress, while high-income households with high fuel shares reflect vehicle dependence, and each demands different policy responses.

The most policy-relevant findings concern vehicle assets and acquisition channels, which the authors treat as proxies for a household’s starting position in the coming transition. Female-majority households have an 8.4 percentage-point lower probability of owning a two-wheeler and a 1.4 percentage-point lower probability of vehicle loan borrowing, both robust after false-discovery-rate adjustment. They also show a 1.0 percentage-point lower probability of car ownership and modestly lower purchase intentions for both vehicle types. Electric-vehicle outcomes, by contrast, are too sparse in the data to support any broad conclusion about gender differences, and the authors explicitly flag that finding as exploratory. Given that two-wheelers are both the backbone of Indian motorized mobility and a major target segment for electrification incentives, this access gap means purchase subsidies, formal credit, and ownership-based benefits may flow disproportionately to households that already have the assets and borrowing pathways to use them.

Exploratory models probing climate and price pressure yielded mostly weak and mixed associations. Transport-price inflation, fuel and light inflation, days above 40 degrees Celsius, and absolute rainfall deviation showed no robust main effects on transport, fuel, or bus and train expenditure shares. The most intriguing nominal pattern, a negative interaction between female-majority status and extreme heat for transport share and a positive one for fuel share, did not survive false-discovery-rate adjustment, with q-values of 0.493 and 0.281 respectively. The authors emphasize that households are not randomly assigned to climate exposure and that expenditure shares may miss mechanisms such as altered trip timing, mode shifts, or service disruptions, which operate without producing large average expenditure changes.

The study’s broader message is that a fair transport transition requires more than electrification. Because the analysis is observational, the authors interpret all estimates as conditional associations rather than causal effects, and they acknowledge that expenditure data cannot reveal who traveled, who paid, or who sacrificed mobility when budgets tightened. Even so, the combination of lower fuel burdens, weaker two-wheeler ownership, and reduced vehicle borrowing among female-majority households paints a consistent picture of unequal starting points. The researchers argue that India’s mobility policy should pair clean-vehicle incentives with affordable and safe public transport, better first- and last-mile connectivity, regulated intermediate services such as auto-rickshaws, heat-resilient waiting environments, and credit designs that do not exclude asset-poor households. Without such measures, the transition risks reinforcing the very mobility inequalities it has the potential to resolve.

Subject of Research: Gendered mobility vulnerability, vehicle access, and transport poverty in India's sustainable transport transition

Article Title: Gendered mobility vulnerability, vehicle access, and unequal starting points for sustainable transport transition in India

Article References: Zeeshan, Z., Khosla, S., & Bhutia, P. C. (2026). Gendered mobility vulnerability, vehicle access, and unequal starting points for sustainable transport transition in India. Frontiers in Future Transportation, 7, Article 1919945. https://doi.org/10.3389/ffutr.2026.1919945

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/ffutr.2026.1919945

Keywords: gendered mobility, India, transport poverty, household expenditure, fuel burden, two-wheeler ownership, sustainable transport, electric vehicles, vehicle access, fixed-effects regression, Consumer Pyramids Household Survey, transport equity