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Prabir Dasgupta, an employee of West Tripura District Court, developed a habit of returning home after office by walking, as the doctor prescribed him to walk at least 40 minutes a day. A resident of Jagaharimura in Agartala, he cannot manage a morning walk and has been habituated to walking home from office for the last 15 years, covering a 4.5-kilometre distance. Nowadays, he has to cut short his route by about 1.5 kilometres to avoid the main road due to traffic congestion and risky access to footpaths.
Nabanita Banik, a clinical psychologist at Agartala Government Medical College, had to stop her morning walk a month ago when she encountered an accident. A middle-aged cyclist was hit from the back by a truck carrying sand in the Post Office Chaumuhani area.
Pradip Das, residing in the heart of Agartala, didn’t allow his teenage son and daughter to go to private tuition in the morning and evening on foot or by cycle to cover only a 1-2 kilometre distance. According to him, roads are most unsafe for children to walk.
Kinjal Bhattacharjee, a student of Class X, is perfect in cycling but doesn’t have the confidence to go to school or tuition even on foot. She has to hire a rickshaw or a ‘Tom Tom’ to cover even a small distance or to be a pillion rider on her father’s electric scooty.
“We are blamed for not doing daily exercise. But parents don’t allow us to cycle in the city or walk with friends. They prefer us to go to the gym, which we don’t like. It’s become a point of conflict in the family,” said Jayanta Roy, a first year BSc student in MBB College.
Anjan Sengupta, an amateur cyclist, loves to cycle every morning but can’t. Only on Sunday morning does he and his team, called Agartala Cycloriders, cover 30-50 kilometres outside the city. “Agartala’s roads are dominated by motorised vehicles. Most of the road shoulders are uneven and used for parking. There is no space for walkers or cyclists. The open spaces have been shrunk due to concrete buildings. Where will our children play, walk or run? Unfortunately, all are blaming youngsters for obesity. But there is no conversation about improving mobility, walkablity, and pedestrian or cyclist safety,” Sengupta pointed out.
Agartala, the capital of Tripura, was developed by the erstwhile king of the eponymous princely state, Bir Chandra Manikya in 1862. He initially developed it to accommodate only 875 people spread over a 3-square-mile area. In 2012, the city extended up to 62 sq km and housed 400,000 people with basic infrastructure built by the Maharaja. In 1972, Agartala had 3,000 registered vehicles, including public buses, at a time when motorable roads stretched to about 200 kilometres in the city. In 1998, vehicle numbers increased to 25,000, and road length increased to 286 kilometres. In 2012, Agartala had registered 150,000 vehicles with 394 kilometres of road in the city. Annual vehicle growth in Tripura reached 108 per cent in 2012, the highest in India’s Northeastern states.
The vehicular growth in Tripura’s capital is exponential. And there are reasons for that.
The government bought over 100 CNG buses under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) for the city. Almost 70 per cent of these buses became off-road due to mechanical faults or were declared unfit. Those that remain are plying on roads distant from Agartala. As a result, the entire public transport system shifted to private cars, three-wheelers and two-wheelers. The 23-kilometre radius of Agartala city with a population of around 600,000 has around 15,000 motorised tricycle rickshaws and Tom Toms, more than 16,000 auto-rickshaws, and over 10,000 private cars, besides hawkers, selling on street parking.
According to the estimate of the leading advocacy group, Association for Research on People and Nature (ARPAN), peak hour mobility of Agartala reduced to 4 kilometres per hour in 2025 from 7 kilometres in 2014. Apart from the increase in the number of vehicles, intermixing of slow (tri-cycle rickshaw) and fast-moving (new generation cars) vehicles running together has created congestion and increased pollution. The record shows that two-wheelers in Tripura registered a 1,476.1 per cent growth in 2024-25, compared to 2019-20. Similarly, three-wheelers, four-wheelers, buses, and small commercial vehicles registered growth of 1,064.6 per cent, 1,868.3 per cent, 7,693.2 per cent, and 3,342.7 per cent respectively during the period.
According to the Agartala Municipal Corporation (AMC), an average of about 90,000 vehicles enter and exit Agartala daily. Location-wise analysis reveals that the maximum volume of traffic is on Bishalgarh Road. The modal mix reveals about 65 per cent motorised passenger vehicles, six per cent of goods vehicles, and 29 per cent of non-motorised vehicles. Two-wheelers and cars constitute the maximum portion of passenger traffic. On the other hand, about 50 per cent of the road length is revealed to have a width of 8-10 metres. High congestion is seen in some of the traffic nodes due to improper road geometry.
The boom in Agartala’s vehicles means the air of the city has become polluted.
The Tripura State Pollution Control Board (TSPCB) Member Secretary Bishu Karmakar said testing of important parameters of air quality — PM10, PM2.5, SO2, and NO2, is carried out twice a week at two locations of Agartala city. During last five years, the Particulate Matter PM-10 ranged from 36.54 to 149.17 microgram per cubic metre (µg/m³), Particulate Matter PM-2.25 ranged from 14.99 to 90.79 µg/m³, SO2 ranged from 2.64 to 19.40 µg/m³ and NO2 ranged from 3.62 to 16.47 µg/m³, he stated. “Since we don’t have any industry in and around the city, the pollutants measured obviously were released from the transport sector,” Karmakar underlined.
Agartala’s residents are also not able to walk or cycle due to the vehicular spike, according to transport officials. Pedestrian volumes are very high on major roads. At present, footpaths on both sides of the road exist on Motor Stand Road, Hariganga Basak Road, Fire Brigade Road, Ujjayanta Palace Road, and Gol-Bazaar Road, but these were encroached by businessmen.
While the number of vehicles in Agartala has spiked, it has fortunately not increased the number of accidents. The accident data, obtained from government records, suggests a declining trend in the city area.
At the same time, the inter-mixing of motorised and non-motorised vehicles has reduced the speed of the city dwellers. Due to slow speed and high parking space requirement, cycle rickshaws are considered the primary cause of congestion in Agartala. The cycle rickshaws get parked on the roadside in the absence of any formal parking lot, causing further obstructions to traffic movement.
“There are also substantial problems related to parking. Sufficient off-street parking spaces are not available in the city. Due to the lack of any authorised and formal parking space, vehicles get parked along the edges of the main city roads, thereby reducing the carriageway of the road. This problem is particularly acute in the areas of Hariganga Basak Road, Netaji Market, Fire Brigade Road, and Motor Stand Road. Between the Orient Chaumuhani and the Jakson Gate, authorised on-street parking areas have been provided by the AMC to accommodate approximately 30 vehicles; however, this is not sufficient to cater to the peak demand,” said Dhiman Daschaudhuri, an environmental activist.
What then, can be done to solve the mobility crisis in Tripura’s capital?
Samrat Choudhury, a young journalist, recalled, “In 2008, we fought in the high court for a comprehensive mobility plan for Agartala. We opposed the licensing of auto-rickshaws and private vehicles for city movement, instead asking for a passenger-friendly dedicated bus service from 6 AM to 10 PM, where passengers shall not wait for a bus; rather, buses will be waiting for passengers. Private motorbikes or cars were to be discouraged and walking, cycling, and travel by bus on the main roads were to be encouraged. The auto rickshaw and pedal rickshaw were to be used for feeder lane connectivity up to the last mile. We proposed a parking policy, but nothing happened.”
The state authorities say they are taking action to meet the mobility challenges.
“We have stopped permitting any more commercial passenger vehicles in Agartala. We have also restricted issuing permits for private vehicles. We are planning to improve the road shoulders and pavements to increase road width and construct footpaths covering the drains to walk on. Multi-layered car parking is coming up in the city, and we are planning to manage the city traffic to increase mobility,” said state transport minister Sushanta Chowdhury.
However, the reality on the ground is different.
Encroachments by vehicles, low operating speeds, congestion in the city, inadequate parking space, improper traffic management, poor public transportation system, lack of pedestrian facilities continue to bedevil Agartala.
Enhancement of road capacity, capacity building of existing public transport system, development of new bypass roads as arterials to decongest the city and road junction improvements have also not been done.
This article is part of our series on how India moves, which looks at the relationship between air quality and human mobility in cities and towns.