India’s Commute Is Now Its Biggest Wellness Threat: How Office Location Design Is Being Rewritten

Aditya Chellaram

When the Commute Becomes a Business Cost

Bengaluru closed out 2025 as the second most congested city in the world by congestion level, behind only Mexico City. TomTom‘s Traffic Index recorded an average congestion level of 74.4%, peak-hour speeds of 16.6 km/h, and an annual loss of 168 hours per commuter to rush-hour traffic – roughly thirteen hours worse than the year before. Numbers like that stop being a traffic story. They become a line item nobody has properly cost.

A hundred and sixty-eight hours is not an abstraction. It is more than four full working weeks a year spent producing nothing and recovering from nothing, simply sitting still. No employer would accept losing that much time to a fixable input anywhere else in the business. Commute time has escaped that scrutiny only because it technically happens outside the building’s four walls.

The behavioural evidence is already visible in how people use offices. MoveInSync’s commute research puts the average Bengaluru GCC employee at roughly 50 minutes to cover about 15 KMs, one way. More telling is what that does to attendance: cab bookings peak at around 82,000 on Wednesdays and fall to about 61,000 on Fridays. Employees are not choosing which days to work. They are choosing which days the commute is worth it. A hybrid policy written in an HR document is being quietly rewritten every week by traffic.

Location Is No Longer a Once-in-a-Lifetime Decision

Location was once a real estate decision made once, at the start of a lease. It is becoming an operating decision, made and remade as the workforce moves.

That shift is showing up in portfolio structure. CBRE’s Flex-plosion report with FICCI, released in March 2026, identifies hub-and-spoke as one of the defining behaviours of enterprise flex adoption in India – a primary campus paired with smaller, closer-to-home locations, increasingly taken up through managed and flexible space rather than conventional leases.

Inside Bengaluru, that means anchoring leadership and core teams on the Outer Ring Road while placing satellite floors in Whitefield, North Bengaluru or Electronic City, where rents run meaningfully lower and commutes for a large share of the workforce shrink. Across the country, the same logic scales: a Tier-1 hub paired with Tier-2 spokes, chosen as much for shorter local commutes as for cost.

It is worth being honest that this is not a settled market consensus. JLL’s work has pointed the other way – that capital has flowed back into upgrading the central hub rather than dispersing into spokes, on the argument that if you are going to ask someone to travel, the destination had better justify the journey. Both readings can be true at once, and in practice they converge on the same conclusion: the hub survives, but it has to earn the commute it demands.

A building’s amenities are a bet on what will happen once someone is already inside it. Its location is a bet on whether they show up at all.

I say that as someone whose own flagship sits on the Outer Ring Road. The hub is not going anywhere, and for most large occupiers in this city it cannot. The ORR belt is where the talent density, the client proximity and the Grade A supply actually are. What changes is the standard the hub is held to, and what a company builds around it.

Commute Is Becoming a Talent and Location Strategy

The cost of ignoring that is no longer theoretical. In September 2025, BlackBuck’s chief executive announced publicly that the company was leaving its Bellandur office on the ORR after nine years, citing one-way commutes crossing an hour and a half and infrastructure he did not expect to improve for 5 years.

Andhra Pradesh’s IT minister responded within a day with a public invitation to relocate to Visakhapatnam. Commute is now a competitive pitch made by rival states. For Global Capability Centres, which drove 43% of India’s office demand in the first half of 2026, the arithmetic is sharper still: much of their advantage rests on retaining specialised talent that took years to train, not months.

Infrastructure will help, but later than the brochures suggest. The ORR metro corridor between Central Silk Board and KR Puram, once targeted for the end of 2026, has been pushed into 2027 with civil and systems works still pending – and ORR is scheduled for white-topping through the same window.

Behind it sits the larger structural fix, the 73.5 km Peripheral Ring Road, now the Bengaluru Business Corridor, which cleared environmental approval in April 2026 and drew bids for its first 19.8 km package in May, with land acquisition still incomplete. Neither project changes 2026 or 2027. Both change the map that a location decision made in 2028 will be judged against.

That is the real shift underway. Developers have spent the last decade competing on what a building offers once an employee walks in: floor plates, certifications, amenities. The more consequential competition is starting earlier, on whether the building sits somewhere an employee can reach without losing two hours of their day. A location strategy built on where talent actually lives, rather than on where a headquarters has always been, is not a wellness gesture. It is the more disciplined way to build a real estate portfolio.

Aditya Chellaram is Executive Director, Featherlite Developers