How Indian cities failed the bicycle

THIS week, the world marked two global occasions: World Bicycle Day on June 3 and World Environment Day on June 5. Their proximity is more than mere coincidence. It is a policy signal that mobility, ecology, and public health belong in the same conversation. The United Nations asks us to be “Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future.” It is a stirring call. It is also, for those of us who have watched India’s ecological inheritance quietly unravel, a call laced with irony. We do not need to be newly inspired by nature. We were, and then we were told to stop.

For centuries, nature was India’s culture. Sacred groves or dev-vans, orans and kovils dotted every state, functioning as community-protected biodiversity reserves long before that phrase existed. Stepwells harvested rainwater; natural dyes and clay vessels left no trace. The jugaad ethic of repair over replacement was a way of being. These were not the practices of a people indifferent to progress, but practices of a civilisation that instinctively understood, only now articulated in policy documents: you cannot separate human prosperity from ecological health.

What changed was not development itself, but the model adopted. Liberalisation brought aspiration bundled with a particular image. By the 1990s, the bicycle had been quietly reclassified from transport to a symbol of poverty. Cycling’s national modal share collapsed from nearly 30% in 1994 to 11% by 2007. The ecological costs compounded: third most polluted country in the world, lost forest cover, over four million tonnes of plastic waste annually, and 54 of the world’s 100 most polluted cities within India’s borders.

The bicycle had not failed the Indian city. Rather, the Indian city had decided the bicycle was embarrassing.

India is a growing economy with a vast population, and the need for motorised transport for industry, freight and urban expansion is real and legitimate. The question is not whether India needs vehicles on its roads, but which vehicles, powered how and supplemented by what. The answer lies in a deliberate mix: expanding metro and bus rapid transit networks, promoting electric vehicles, incentivising carpooling and building last-mile infrastructure that makes cycling genuinely viable.

Industrialised societies carry a familiar set of costs: air pollution, congestion, carbon emissions and road fatalities. India faces all of these simultaneously. It ranks among the world’s highest in road accident deaths. More than 1.7 lakh fatalities in 2022 alone reflect not just driver behaviour but systemic failures in road design and safety infrastructure. Answering calls of the UN means recognising that greener transport cannot succeed on intent alone. It requires roads safe enough to cycle on, and cities designed for people rather than vehicles.

Other nations offer instructive models. Japan’s concept of ‘mottainai’, rooted in cultural regret over waste, has been woven into packaging law and daily governance, demonstrating that tradition and progress need not be in conflict. The Netherlands, not initially a cycling nation, offers a sharper lesson today: bicycles outnumber people, cycling accounts for 27% of all trips and is estimated to prevent 6,500 deaths annually, delivering health benefits worth over 3% of the Dutch GDP. The irony cuts deep. India abandoned the bicycle to look modern, while Europe built its vision of the modern city around it.

India can learn from both models, but cannot import either. Its population scale and social landscape are distinct. Here, cycling is still coded as a marker of poverty. The person who cycles to work is seen as someone who had no choice. This prejudice is more than merely attitudinal. Chandigarh illustrates it precisely. The city has one of India’s finest cycling path networks, yet those lanes remain largely empty. Safety concerns, inadequate lighting, encroachment, and social prejudice all conspire against utilisation. A population stuck between inherited preconception and the aspiration to appear modern will not shift through awareness campaigns alone.

Four shifts are needed, in policy rather than aspiration. First, cycling infrastructure must be treated as core transport policy with protected lanes, secure parking and integrated public transit. Second, road safety must be elevated to the status of a public health emergency. Safer street design and dedicated corridors for cyclists and pedestrians are prerequisites for any cycling culture to take hold. Third, cycling corridors must include shade structures, tree canopies and heat-reflective surfacing as functional requirements.

Fourth, we must bring tree preservation into road infrastructure policy, rather than trading it away. Every urban road-widening project that slashes a mature tree removes decades of cooling, air filtration and canopy cover that no replanting programme meaningfully replaces in a human lifetime. Tree-lined cycling corridors are an efficient infrastructure that provides shade for the rider and cools the asphalt. If we are serious about being 'inspired by nature,' the least we can do is stop cutting it down to make way for another lane of traffic."

The two occasions this week do not ask us to invent a new relationship with nature or mobility. They ask us to repair the one we severed. For India, that repair does not begin at a climate conference. It begins with the honest acknowledgement that we walked away from a way of living (and moving) that worked, and that the path back is not retreat,

but reclamation.

As Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” We knew that once. The question is whether we are ready to follow it.