The question of who pays for public transport is fundamentally a question of who the city belongs to. When bus and metro fares eat into the wages of workers, students, and the urban poor, they reproduce the social and economic inequalities in cities. We argue that fare-free public transport is not a "freebie" but a recognition that mobility is a precondition for accessing education, employment, healthcare, and civic life.

It is encouraging to see several Indian states already moving towards making buses free for women, students, and other groups, and their experiences demonstrate that this is not utopian but achievable. We work to demand expansion of these schemes to other states, document their impact, build public understanding of their value, and push for universal fare-free travel as the horizon of urban transport policy.