Our goal with The Daily Brief is to simplify the biggest stories in the Indian markets and help you understand what they mean. We won’t just tell you what happened; we’ll tell you why and how too. We do this show in both formats: video and audio. This piece curates the stories that we talk about.
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch the videos on YouTube. You can also watch The Daily Brief in Hindi.
In today’s edition of The Daily Brief:
1. Inside India’s first household travel survey
The NSO’s first travel survey shows the average Indian worker commutes to work in ~25 minutes, with two-wheelers (42.6%) and walking (28.3%) dominating workforce mobility. Mass rail transit carries just 2.1% of commuters nationwide, concentrated mostly in Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Delhi. Female workers face restricted travel radiuses due to domestic duties and safety, while 70% of long-distance overnight trips are driven by social and religious obligations rather than tourism.
2. Supreme Court questions 10x markup on cancer drugs
The Supreme Court scrutinised extreme markups on non-scheduled cancer drugs where retailer purchase prices of ₹2,700 carried printed MRPs of ₹27,000. Unlike essential scheduled drugs with capped 16% retail margins, non-scheduled drugs allow manufacturers to set high MRPs, incentivising sales of higher-margin brands. To curb exploitation without risking supply shortages, the government is extending a 30% Trade Margin Rationalisation cap across all non-scheduled anti-cancer medicines.
Our latest episode on Subtext is with Prof. Rakesh Basant, who taught economics at IIM-A for over 3 decades and helped found one of India's first incubators, CIIE, at IIM-A.
In the episode, we talk about how innovation in India really works. The chat spans knowledge transfer between companies, how intellectual property, patents, and R&D spend function, academia-industry linkages in India, and how to put academic theory into practice.
The episode is available on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Inside India’s first household travel survey
You’re probably well-aware of the complaints Indians often make about the traffic jams they’re trapped in while travelling to their workplace, often from metropolises like Bengaluru, Mumbai, and so on.
But in India, those complaints aren’t representative of the average Indian worker. Nor does the data tell the story that social media seems to paint.
If anything, the headline finding might take you aback. Most workers in India who have fixed workplaces get there in about 25 minutes. Can you believe that?
That number comes from the first-ever National Household Travel Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office between July 2025 and June 2026. It covers over twenty lakh people across the country. To filter out trivial movements, the survey excluded trips under one kilometre and overnight journeys shorter than fifty kilometres.
What emerges is an incredible repository of how India travels for work and personal reasons, and it challenges many conventional assumptions and even casual observations we make about the purpose of Indian infrastructure. And that 25-minute headline figure has a lot of nuance behind it, too.
In this story, we’ll be looking at some core findings across the survey and then drill down into what they mean exactly, along with some very interesting charts created by us.
Work travel
The first finding is how people travel for work specifically, and the role of rail in it.
Over the past two decades, central and state governments have poured massive capital into modern urban transit. You can see the concrete viaducts cutting through almost every major Indian city now.
Yet mass rail transit, which includes metros, monorails, suburban rail, and trams, carries just 5% of urban commuters to their jobs. The national average for this category is 2.1%.
Even that modest number leans heavily on three places with legacy rail networks: Maharashtra at nearly 21%, West Bengal at 16.5%, and Delhi at ~14%. These figures combine century-old suburban rail systems (like the Mumbai local) with modern metro lines. Outside these three corridors, mass rail transit hardly makes a dent.
The form of transport that powers daily commute the most is the humble two-wheeler. Scooters and motorcycles carry ~43% of all workers. In cities alone, that share rises to ~52%. Interestingly, the travel form trailing two-wheelers at second is walking, which stands at ~28% nationally. Personal cars, meanwhile, carry just 3%.
It’s tempting to read that 5% and conclude that metro investment has failed. But that misreads how transit networks mature.
After all,a metro corridor is a fifty-year asset. Metro ridership only picks up when a system achieves network density, linking radial lines through interchanges and connecting with reliable feeder services. An isolated corridor is useless in that sense. In many secondary cities, operational metro lines are still single-corridor stubs. Comparing a stub to a mature road network mistakes an incomplete system for a failure of demand.
But planners must also reckon with commuter economics. If a worker lives 3 km from the nearest station and works 2 km from the destination platform, completing the journey requires two feeder trips on top of the train ticket. We’ve also covered before that one of the big reasons hindering metro adoption is the lack of easy last-mile connectivity after you exit the metro station. For millions of wage earners, that multimodal chain costs more money and time than just riding a motorcycle door to door.
What’s behind the 25-minute commute?
The second finding is one that we mentioned above: the average worker takes 25 minutes to travel to their workplace.
Across India, 83.4% of workers reach their fixed workplaces in under 30 minutes. In cities, the average is around 27 minutes, while in rural areas, it’s 23. More than half of all commuters leave home between 8 and 10 in the morning.
But is a 25 minute-average a sign that Indian transport works well? Or does it signal a different malaise?
One reading of this statistic is bleak. When public transit is slow, expensive, or fragmented, a worker’s geographic perimeter dictates their economic opportunities. Workers with fixed workplaces spend an average of ₹785 a month on commuting. This figure is ₹1,044 in cities and ₹612 in rural areas. For an informal labourer earning ₹8,000 a month, that’s over 12% of household income just getting to work.
Suppose a factory 15 km away offers slightly higher wages. But reaching it means two bus connections and an auto ride. The fares and transfer time quickly cancel out the wage bump. So, workers settle for lower-paying jobs closer to home, and not necessarily because they prefer it. Transport economists call this phenomenon “spatial entrapment”, where the radius you can afford to travel defines the ceiling on your wage growth.
But there is a more generous reading of the 25-minute average, too.
This one says that Indian cities aren’t built like American ones, where there’s a single downtown everyone commutes into from distant suburbs. Jobs are scattered everywhere in Indian cities. There could be a garment workshop next to the housing colony, there’s a wholesale market a kilometre away from the chawl, there’s domestic staff living in the settlement adjacent to the neighbourhood they serve. Workers don’t need to cross the city because the city already puts work near where they live.
But it’s worth noting that even this reading doesn’t make a comment on the quality of the jobs. For instance, a software engineer working in, say, the Whitefield area of Bengaluru will always be better paid than domestic staff living close to the home they serve. But the former might have to travel a lot more than the latter.
That being said, across countries and centuries, people seem to keep their daily commute to roughly thirty minutes each way, regardless of how much they earn or what transport is available to them. When cities build faster trains, commuters don’t pocket the saved time. They move farther out, looking for better jobs or bigger homes. The total travel budget stays roughly constant. Indian cities, polycentric and mixed-use by nature, may simply be following that universal pattern at their own income level.
The truth is probably both at once. That twenty-five-minute average reflects the functional convenience of mixed-use neighbourhoods and the hard financial ceiling set by travel costs.
A different kind of glass ceiling
Travel friction limits the mobility of all workers. But it hits women far harder. Nationally, ~62% of male workers commute more than 1 km to their fixed workplace. For women, that same share is ~42%.
Since the survey excluded trips under one kilometre, this means most working women either work within their immediate neighbourhood or don’t travel outside their local block for employment at all.
The spending gap mirrors this. Male workers spend ₹835 a month on commuting; women spend ₹533. In rural India, the same gap is ₹674 versus ₹307.
Part of this is about vehicle access and safety. In many households, the family’s one scooter or motorcycle goes to the primary male earner. A woman commuting outside her neighbourhood must rely on buses, shared autos, or walking, and shared autos charge more per kilometre than fuel costs on a motorcycle. Poor street lighting and isolated bus stops add real safety friction during early mornings and late evenings.
But attributing this twenty-point gap entirely to transport misses a bigger force at work: unpaid domestic labour.
Women shoulder the bulk of cooking, childcare, eldercare, and household management. A working woman often can’t commit to an hour-long commute even if transit were free and perfectly reliable. She must stay within reach of home to manage household duties through the day. Under these conditions, women rationally prioritise nearby jobs, accepting lower wages in exchange for proximity.
Several state governments have tried to address this through fare-free bus travel for women. Ridership went up, and local non-work journeys got easier. But while fare waivers have been found to help boost female labour force participation, they’re not enough. The gap demands more than subsidised passes. It requires neighbourhood childcare, safe pedestrian infrastructure, and formal employment opportunities closer to where women live.
Late for the school bus
India’s mobility boundaries are hardly limited to working people. They also extend to students, both in schools and colleges.
The survey shows that ~66% of students aged six and above travel more than 1 km daily to reach their educational institutions. School trips rely overwhelmingly on walking at 37%, buses at 29.5%, and bicycles at 15.8%. Two-wheelers carry just 6.7% of students. That’s a complete change of the order for workers.
Students also keep their commutes tight. Nearly 88% reach their institutions in under 30 minutes, at an average monthly cost of ₹443. This reflects the decentralised spread of primary and secondary schooling across India. Neighbourhood government schools and local private institutions let younger children walk or cycle short distances. It’s also possible that families may prioritize to locate themselves or buy a house as close as possible to schools for their children.
But as students move into secondary school, college, and vocational training, the travel radius expands. For older students, especially young women, the availability of safe bus services and bicycle corridors often determines whether they continue their education or drop out. In urban India, among youth aged 15-29, ~73% make regular daily commutes to educational institutions.
Long-distance travel
So far, much of what we’ve covered mostly involves daily, shorter-run commute. Meanwhile, long-distance travel reveals a completely different side of Indian mobility, even challenging long-held assumptions about the purpose of long-distance travel.
Of all the overnight household trips in India the survey captured, 70% were driven by socialising, family obligations, and religious activities. When a family member faces a health crisis, needs help with childcare, or organises a wedding, physical presence is non-negotiable. Missing a family gathering weakens the social capital that protects households against financial shocks. This is all the more important when the household doesn’t have access to unemployment benefits or public health coverage.
But more importantly, what’s clear here is that business and vacations are not at play here. In fact, culture, leisure, and tourism account for just 7.4% of overnight trips nationally. A mere blip compared to social obligation.
The modes of transport also reflect this. Buses account for ~56% of overnight journeys, while railways carry ~18%. Together, they handle nearly three-quarters of all long-distance household travel. But train usage shows a sharp rural-urban divide — railways carry 22.7% of overnight travellers from urban households, versus just 14% from rural ones. Rural families, which live far from mainline stations, depend a lot on state transport buses.
This has real implications for railway finances. It’s well-known that Indian Railways charges a premium on freight to cross-subsidise cheap unreserved passenger travel. As the carrier modernises rolling stock and expands air-conditioned services, it cannot afford to price out unreserved seating. For millions of families, basic rail and bus services aren’t consumer luxuries. They are the links that hold the informal safety net together.
Conclusion
The survey’s findings make quantitative what, to a degree, might be obvious observationally: Indian mobility doesn’t run on marquee corridors. It runs on two wheels, on municipal buses, and on foot. Mass transit carries one urban commuter in twenty; the motorcycle carries one in two. For many women, transport costs and care responsibilities may limit how far they can travel for work, something a World Bank study also points to. And seven in ten long-distance journeys aren’t vacations, but the trips that hold families together.
That being said, the finding that the average worker takes 25 minutes to get to work may hide a lot of nuances beneath. It never calculates the quality of the work; for that, we recommend going through one of our earlier stories on Indian unemployment.
Infrastructure policy will have to be made accordingly. Much of it is done with certain expectations about the growth of cities, and broadly, the Indian economy. But on the ground, it’s the little things like last-mile connectivity that make much more of a difference.
Supreme Court questions 10x markup on cancer drugs
A cancer medicine reaches a retailer for about ₹2,700. Its printed maximum retail price, or MRP, is nearly ₹27,000.
That tenfold gap recently came up before the Supreme Court. During a September 29 hearing, the bench described such markups as “broad daylight dacoity with patients” and questioned why the government could not limit the gap between retailer prices and what consumers can be charged.
This reminded us of a story we wrote in June, where the government faced almost the opposite problem.
Two cancer medicines were becoming difficult to find. Manufacturers said regulated prices had become too low to cover rising costs. To protect supplies, the government allowed prices to rise by as much as 50%.
Then, the concern was that medicines weren’t worth making at the permitted price. Now, it is that the gap between purchase prices and printed prices leaves enormous room for markups.
Both stories sit within the same drug-pricing system. To understand how, we need a quick recap.
Two sets of rules
India’s medicine-price regulator is the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority, or NPPA. It implements the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 2013. That’s the rulebook governing medicine prices.
The rules separate medicines into scheduled and non-scheduled formulations. A formulation is a medicine in a particular strength and dosage form, such as a tablet or injection.
Scheduled formulations appear in Schedule I of the order, based on the National List of Essential Medicines, or NLEM. They face government-set ceiling prices. Non-scheduled formulations fall outside that schedule.
“Essential” here has a specific meaning. The list identifies medicines needed to meet the population’s priority healthcare needs. Selection considers the diseases prevalent in India, evidence of safety and effectiveness, and comparative cost-effectiveness. Being outside the list doesn’t mean a medicine is unnecessary for someone who needs it.
Scheduled medicines reportedly account for roughly 20% of India’s drug market by sales value. Around 80% therefore sits outside the ordinary ceiling-price system, though other pricing restrictions still apply.
For scheduled formulations, the NPPA takes the prices charged to retailers for brands and generic versions with at least 1% market share, averages them, and adds a 16% retailer margin.
Say the qualifying prices are ₹80, ₹100 and ₹120. Their average is ₹100. Adding 16% produces a ceiling of ₹116, before applicable taxes. These ceilings are subsequently adjusted using the Wholesale Price Index, or WPI, under the pricing rules.
This is a market-based calculation, not one based on manufacturing costs, as the government clarified in Parliament. The ceiling also doesn’t automatically reset when a hospital negotiates a cheaper purchase. So the 16% in the formula doesn’t guarantee that every seller’s actual purchase-to-sale gap stays at 16%.
When the ceiling became a problem
Our June story concerned cisplatin and carboplatin, two chemotherapy medicines within the price-control system.
Manufacturers said rising input costs had made production unviable at the permitted prices. Both medicines use platinum-based raw materials, and suppliers also faced import and production difficulties.
The annual price adjustment followed economy-wide wholesale inflation. It didn’t necessarily reflect the much sharper increase in the cost of making these medicines.
The government therefore used Paragraph 19, an exceptional provision in the pricing order, to allow higher prices and protect supplies.
As we noted then, price caps weren’t conclusively the sole cause of the shortages. Raw-material availability, import delays and the small number of manufacturers mattered too. But the episode illustrated a real risk: a medicine can be affordable on paper and still be inaccessible if nobody supplies it.
When the starting price is the problem
Non-scheduled medicines face a different system.
Under the ordinary rules, manufacturers generally choose the initial MRP. Subsequent increases cannot exceed 10% over the preceding 12 months, although special price interventions can apply.
If a medicine launches at ₹20,000, restricting its next increase to ₹22,000 does nothing to establish whether ₹20,000 was reasonable in the first place. The rule controls how quickly the price rises, without necessarily making the starting price affordable.
This is one of the issues raised in the petitions before the Supreme Court, alongside the enormous gaps between retailer purchase prices and printed MRPs.
That brings us back to the ₹2,700 and ₹27,000 example. The first figure was the reported price to the retailer—not the manufacturing cost. The second was its MRP, which need not be what every patient actually paid.
Unlike the scheduled-drug formula, which includes a 16% retailer margin, non-scheduled medicines generally have no equivalent margin restriction unless a special intervention applies. Manufacturers can set a high MRP while supplying the medicine at a much lower price, leaving an attractive margin for the pharmacy or hospital selling it.
That creates an incentive to favour medicines offering larger margins, even when cheaper alternatives exist. The Competition Commission of India’s pharmaceutical market study identified precisely this problem: companies can compete to offer sellers better margins rather than patients lower prices. Hospital pharmacies face even less competitive pressure when inpatients have to buy from them.
The court questioned whether a uniform rule linking MRP more closely to the retailer price could address this. It did not impose a nationwide 16% cap: its September 29 written order listed the matter for further hearing on October 12.
A middle path already exists
In 2019, the NPPA used the exceptional power that can allow price increases to intervene in the prices of 42 selected non-scheduled anti-cancer medicines.
It used trade margin rationalisation, or TMR, restricting the margin between the price at the first point of sale and the final retail price to 30%.
Under that formula, the starting point was the price to the stockist, and the margin was measured as a share of the final price, excluding GST.
For example, a ₹700 stockist price could translate into a maximum retail price of ₹1,000 before GST. The ₹300 difference is 30% of the final price.
This was a middle path. The medicines remained non-scheduled, but the government constrained distribution margins rather than applying the usual scheduled-drug averaging formula.
It delivered substantial price reductions. In a March 2026 parliamentary reply, the government said the intervention had reduced prices across more than 500 brands by an average of about 50%.
While we were putting this story together, there was another development. On October 8, reports citing government sources said the Centre had decided to extend the 30% trade-margin cap to all non-scheduled anti-cancer medicines, covering branded and generic, domestic and imported, patented and non-patented products.
The decision comes ahead of the October 12 hearing. The notification and implementation details will determine exactly how it takes effect.
Affordability needs more than a cap
The government’s goal should be to ensure people can get the medicines they need at prices they can afford. Price caps can help, but access also depends on how medicines are bought, prescribed and sold.
Reliable public procurement can keep affordable medicines in stock. Wider availability of quality-assured generics can give doctors cheaper options to prescribe. And allowing patients to buy from competing pharmacies can help them avoid expensive hospital markups—one of the concerns examined in the CCI’s study.
Controlling the price is only one part of making treatment accessible.
- This edition of the newsletter was written by Bhuvan, Manie & Kulsum.
Tidbits
1. Lava, Optiemus among firms eyeing smartphone brand incentives
Domestic electronics manufacturers including Lava and Optiemus Infracom are reportedly seeking incentives under a proposed government scheme to build global smartphone brands. The initiative aims to help India’s electronics industry move beyond contract manufacturing and establish internationally recognised, Indian-owned device brands.
Source: Livemint
2. Tomato prices more than double in a month as September weather hits supply
Tomato prices have more than doubled over the past month as warmer weather, weaker rainfall and colder nights in September hurt fruit-setting and reduced market arrivals. El Niño-related weather conditions have tightened supplies from key producing regions.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine
3. Andhra Pradesh announces nearly ₹25,000 crore of investments and project groundings at Vizag conference
The Andhra Pradesh government signed 31 MoUs worth about ₹21,500 crore at a regional industry conference in Visakhapatnam. Another 33 projects worth around ₹3,500 crore were inaugurated or grounded, taking the total investment represented at the event to roughly ₹25,000 crore.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine
4. Automobile retail sales surge 31.8% to record high in September
India’s automobile retail sales reached 25.37 lakh units in September, rising 31.82% year-on-year, according to FADA. The increase was driven by strong demand for two-wheelers and passenger vehicles.
Source: Business Standard
5. Starlink builds India-specific infrastructure ahead of commercial launch
Starlink has built 20 gateway sites and India-specific security controls, with the company saying Indian user data will remain within the country. The satellite operator has completed much of its ground infrastructure but still requires spectrum and security clearances before launching commercial services.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine
Want more tidbits? Catch up on last week’s recap!
Beyond Today’s Brief
There’s always more happening at Markets by Zerodha.
The Chatter: What strategic trends are leaders in banking, payment solutions, dairy, and retail highlighting? How are PNB and Central Bank of India driving credit expansion while managing funding costs? And how are Manipal Payments, Dodla Dairy, and Rentomojo scaling high-margin metal cards, regional processing hubs, and subscription-led retail?
Points & Figures: What does having a job even mean in today’s economy? And how are the blurring lines between formal employment, gig work, and underemployment complicating India’s labour market data?
Aftermarket Report: How did Nifty sink 1.64% to a fresh 52-week low of 22,232 amid surging oil prices and persistent global pressures? And what do extreme fear readings, 68 new 52-week lows, and ₹12,944 crore in foreign institutional selling reveal as all 15 sectors closed in the red?
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I read in some newspaper long ago, that the higher your education qualification is, the farther you need to commute for a job..
Everything in this travel survey was relatable, as I kept reading, I felt like this was describing my entire life experience with travelling. Born In West bengal schooling was within cycling distance, growing up university was accessible through local bus and during that time i observed how busy DumDum station would be in office hours. Whenever visited my village in Jharkhand for marriages and festivals the maximum chosen option was bus, travelled overnight.
Now living in Hyderabad could see more than half of the population is travelling through two wheeler for their corporate office and some of them also travelling through their personal cars because the public transport here is quite less compared to Bengal.