It’s 8.30 a.m. on an April morning. Soon, temperatures will build up to 40 degrees Celsius. Traffic peaks at a T-junction in south Delhi, about 15 kilometres from the Haryana border. The green light will turn to amber in 20 seconds. Vehicles race to make it through the signal. Ajay rises slightly off his bicycle seat, his torso pushing forward with each pedal, to gain momentum. A bus cuts close; horns blare. He moves among the cluster of 20-30 workers on bicycles. They jostle for space behind buses, e-rickshaws, cars, and motorcycles — the mixed traffic bane of a developing economy.

“Jo 10 seconds isko cross karne mein bitate hain, yehi sabse bhari hai (The 10 seconds at this intersection are the hardest)”, Ajay says, pausing briefly. His thin, faded blue cotton shirt, damp with sweat, clings to his frame. He removes the gamcha (scarf) looped around his neck and pours water over it to wipe his face. “It is going to get worse,” he says, of the heat and three more intersections he must navigate to reach his workplace. He rides 27 kilometres daily from Faridabad to Green Park, where he works as a security guard.

Within 5 minutes, around 200 cyclists cross the Hamdard intersection, heading to their workplaces in south and central Delhi. Among them are security guards, salespeople, daily wagers, and factory workers, most riding in from Delhi’s affordable peripheries. None earns more than ₹20,000. Most carry water and lunch in a bag strapped to the handlebars or on their shoulders.

Over a week, The Hindu spoke to 54 people who travel at least 20 km six days a week on their steel-frame roadsters: Avons, Neelams, Atlases, and Heroes. Nearly half of them have met with accidents, some leading to serious injuries, but they continue to rely on bicycles as their primary vehicle. Their decision to pedal on routes linking their homes to industrial and commercial corridors comes down to affordability and access to public transportation.

According to data from the 2011 Census, nearly 10 lakh out of 85 lakh workers in Delhi cycled to work. The first draft Master Plan of Delhi (MPD) 2041, released in 2021, also notes that walking and cycling constitute 42% of the “total trips”. As aspirational automobiles have taken over Delhi’s road networks over the past couple of decades, segregated cycling lanes remain sparse.

In 2015, the Delhi government reframed cycling as a “recreational sport”, announcing plans to develop cycling tracks on central stretches of the city and parks. In doing so, it sidelined the existing cycling culture of those compelled by low pay and the lack of last-mile connectivity to public transport to commute the slow way through heat waves and smog.

The Delhi Economic Survey 2025-26 doesn’t count non-motor vehicles. It outlines numerous projects for elevated roads and flyovers, foot over-bridges, and the metro network. There is no mention of cycling networks. In fact, bicycles don’t require registration or licensing. Much of the recent policy focus has been on electric vehicles, which doesn’t extend to existing cyclists.

Who cycles, and why

Travelling from his village near the Loni border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, Shriram Sharma crosses six busy intersections in his two-hour-long ride to reach his security guard job at a government institution in central Delhi at 1 p.m. With his shift ending at 10 p.m., he returns close to midnight. Through the heatwave, he says the exertion doubles, and he has to take breaks. The 52-year-old has held different jobs since 1991. His last was as a harmonium teacher. He learnt to play at 36 from a man at the village temple. “In a few months, I began to teach at a private school near my village. Though the gigs were few, it was the most fulfilling time of my life,” he says. Sharma cannot afford that life any more. “I am the only earning member of the family,” he says. He cannot afford buses either because a day’s journey costs between ₹80 and ₹100, and he earns only ₹17,500 a month. He has been commuting this way since 2007.

The Delhi Government says it is replacing the city’s declining bus fleet. Chief Minister Rekha Gupta had announced in March 2026 that by the end of the year, Delhi would have 7,000 buses, up from the current 6,300. She added the city would need 14,000 buses by 2029, which the government would provide.

Sandeep Kumar, 23, cycles about 20 km, from north-east Delhi’s Ram Park to Chandni Chowk, where he works at a wholesale stationery shop making ₹12,000 a month. He started working at 16 after dropping out of school to support his family. Soaked in sweat, he says the journey itself is not the problem. “The noise, the heat, and dark stretches without lights. Those are difficult,” he says. He pauses under the elevated stretch of the Delhi-Dehradun Expressway to buy water while returning on a humid April evening. The traffic reverberates all around. “There are barely any footpaths for walkers. A proper cycling network sounds like a fantasy,” Kumar says.

In 2020, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) came up with a five-year plan to develop 200 km of a cycle-walk network. Its first 36 km remain in the works, say officials. What has been constructed is obstructed in many places by parked cars and debris. Nearly all the workers The Hindu spoke to are migrants whose families moved to the Capital for work. Most were forced to drop out of school to support their families. “What matters is having a job with a steady wage and saving every rupee we can to ensure our children have a better life,” says Mohammed Jamal, 43, an artisan at a boutique in Greater Kailash. He rides 40 minutes one way because the bus stop is 2 km away from his house. Jamal says he was scared of cycling as a young child but learnt as a teen because ‘majboori (compulsion)’ beats fear.

An economical black roadster typically starts at ₹3,000, and workers often opt for second-hand ones. They say a cycle lasts for five years with timely repairs but worry more about their cycles being stolen.

Women ride in disguise

In the Delhi government’s 2026-27 budget, ₹90 crore has been allocated to give approximately 1.3 lakh girls in Class 9 free bicycles to help them commute to school and reduce dropout rates. While the initiative has worked in other States, Rachna Singh, in her 30s, says she finds it difficult to navigate Delhi’s roads dominated by male workers. She dresses to avoid attention: She wears her son’s clothes and covers her face with a black dupatta. Cycling 25 km one way to Chirag Delhi from Khanpur, Rachna is running late on a Wednesday morning. While her 12-hour shift as a security guard starts at 10.30 a.m., her day starts at 4 a.m. There is the day’s cleaning, cooking and packing of lunch. She gets home only by midnight.

“I used to feel scared at night in the first few weeks. Those driving cars and riding bikes used to harass me. It stopped when I changed the way I dressed,” she recalls. Rachna doesn’t carry a mobile phone with her; her son carries hers.

She took up the job after COVID as loan interests started adding up. “One person’s income in a big city is not enough,” she says. After her husband bought a motorcycle, his cycle became hers. “Buses were very crowded in the day and at night, they were empty, or didn’t show up. I struggled a lot. So, I switched to the cycle,” she says.

Women cyclists are rare. The Hindu encountered only two among the 54 people it spoke to across corridors in south, east, north, and central Delhi. A 2021 study across 19 cities in 13 countries, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed journal Transportation, found that women are, on average, half as likely as men to cycle. In Delhi, the gap is sharper. Only about 1.1% of women reported cycling compared with 6.9% of men. For work trips, women relied more on walking (37.6%) and public transport (34.4%). Studies point to the fear of harassment and assault as a deterrent.

The risks and bargains

Two summers ago, 27-year-old Mohammed Gurfan was hit by a car at the U-turn he must make on his daily commute at about 9:30 a.m. “My shirt was soaked in blood,” he recalls, describing how the car hit him. “The driver simply overtook and left.” It took four months for him to recover but he still had to show up to work, traversing the same route to R.K. Puram, 14 kilometres away from home. “I get nervous on flyovers, where cars and motorcycles speed. Anybody can hit us and ride over us. As if our lives are as cheap as the bicycles we ride,” Gurfan says.

Cyclists have twice the fatality risk per kilometre as motorcycle occupants and about 40 times greater risk than car occupants, according to a study published in 2024, in the International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion. U-turns are a strong risk factor for bicycle fatalities in Delhi, along with medians, crossings, intersections, and roundabouts, the study states. Senior riders, like Diwakar, in his 60s, walk their cycles through busy stretches. His cycle, like most others, has neither a headlight nor a bell because those are feeble in comparison to the lights and horns of motor vehicles on Delhi’s roads.

The lack of empathy for cyclists bothers Sonu, Gurfan, and Diwakar on every trip. ‘Hum log dikhte nahi hain, na log humko dekhna chahte hain (People don’t see us; nor do they want to)’, says Sonu. He describes the road as a space where access is unevenly held. “Like in villages, some people control shared resources. On roads, those with more take more space,” he says.

One of the authors of the 2021 study, Rahul Goel, says, “Areas where people cycle should guide where infrastructure comes up. Much of Delhi’s cycling happens in peripheral areas,” where low-income populations live and work. Goel is an assistant professor at IIT Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention (TRIP) centre.

In 2026, DDA took up building cycle tracks on the Yamuna floodplains, stretching over 55 km. “There is nothing wrong with building for recreation. But it becomes a problem when infrastructure does not respond to the thousands who already cycle every day,” Goel says. The draft MPD 2041 also notes that most of Delhi’s roads are not conducive to cyclist movement due to unequal road distribution and lack of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the adult cycle market shows that demand remains high in the low-cost roadster bicycle category. Gaurav Munjal, Managing Director of Kross bikes, a brand manufactured by Hero Ecotech Limited, says cycling for recreation is limited to a few cycling groups in metro cities. For low-cost cycles (in the ₹3,000 to 8,000 category), the competition is steep because “even a difference of ₹500 matters”, he adds. Part of the competition for factory-manufactured bicycles is the local dealer who offers assembled cycles at cheaper rates.

There is no moving on

Back at the busy T-point intersection in south Delhi, Naushad Saabri, 47, sets up his bicycle repair spot along the footpath of a four-lane road. There is no signboard, no structure, just tools stacked against the footpath’s barricade. He recalls that when he started in 1990, “This was a single-lane road. The rest was jungle.”

The road widened; his earnings did not. “I used to make ₹2,000 a day. Now it is around ₹500.” Most days bring punctures, worn-out tubes, and damaged tyres. His loyal customer base has cyclists coming from Haryana’s Ballabhgarh for yearly maintenance work. “It costs them ₹1,000-1,200,” he says. The work is steady, but not enough any more.

With faster-moving, burgeoning traffic, he has been witness to many deadly accidents. “Most happen at the signal. There are so many U-turns; it’s hard for cyclists,” he says.

Saabri says he is considering shutting the shop and moving to a motor garage. But he won’t part with his father’s bicycle, bought in 1989. Like the Ship of Theseus, every part of it has been replaced over time. “This cycle, as it is now, I have made it myself,” he says, adding that he feels his father is with him as he rides it.

Saabri still rides 300 kilometres every few months to a dargah near his village in Uttar Pradesh and then further on to Barabanki, Lucknow, Ajmer, and Uttarakhand.

In 2015, the DDA piloted a public bicycle sharing project in Dwarka with the aim of formulating a citywide policy. The report released after pointed to several operational challenges, and the project was stalled.

The Delhi Metro has 112 cycle-sharing points with at least eight cycles at each near its stations and institutions, while the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) operates 500 e-bikes in areas under its jurisdiction, primarily central Delhi. These are available on an app-based system, requiring smartphones.