No abstract

Non-motorised transport (NMT) modes, including cycles, pedal rickshaws, and animal-driven carts, were once the dominant way of moving around in Indian. Yet the share of cycling declined from an average of 30% in 1994 to 11 % by 2008, alongside a 12% rise in the share of personal modes of transport and declining public transport trips. A rising number of fatalities, overall congestion, and poor air quality have affected the quality of life in Indian cities. Lack of integration between land use and transportation, the absence of an enabling environment for NMT modes and poor transportation demand management have raised questions over Indian cities’ preparedness to transition to a low carbon future. This chapter argues that the translation of progressive policies into action has been marred by confusion and ad-hocism which has harmed the cause of low carbon transitions even further. It traces how an early post-independence obsession with modernity drove cities away from a low carbon sustainable model to a more energy-intensive model. A narrow re-imagining of roads as mere thoroughfares combined with borrowed motifs of modernity led to a culture of automobility that prioritises personal mobility over other low carbon alternatives. The chapter argues that despite the many challenges facing the prospect of low carbon transitions, recent government interventions in the form of policies and programmes present some hope.

Cycles are fast disappearing from the urban landscape, popular culture, and everyday life in India. The marginalization of cycling is seen in the backdrop of an emerging automobile culture linked with rising incomes, post-liberalization and skewed notions of modernity. The continued dominance of motorized modes seeks to claim a larger share of road space mirroring the social power structure. The majority of urban cyclists in India are low-income workers or school-going children. Despite the emergence of a subculture of recreational cycling among higher-income groups, everyday cycling confronts social bias and neglect in urban policies and public projects. The rhetoric of sustainability and equity in the National Urban Transport Policy 2006 and pro-cycling initiatives in “best practice” transit projects are subverted by not building adequate enabling infrastructure. This article presents an overview of contentious issues related to cycling in Indian cities by examining the politics of inclusion and exclusion in urban policies.

A lacuna in our understanding of how publicness of public transit is being constituted is the primary point of departure for this paper. In recent times, publicness has been articulated through two parallel readings – one, a political economic reading that sees publicness through static macrostructural constraints; and two, micro-sociality aboard public transit manifests an in situ and spontaneous public space. Moving beyond the static and the spontaneous, we articulate a dynamic co-constituted notion of publicness. Building upon recent work that examines the entangling of micro- and macropolitics onboard public transit and relying upon a mobile ethnographic approach revolving around situated observation and interviewing surrounding buses located in the Indian metropolis of Bengaluru, this paper offers publicness as a contingent entity that is constituted through the process of transiting.