Funding & Financing
While a large portion of our work focuses on ensuring people can move easily and safely across cities, a key challenge lies in how these efforts are financed and sustained. Many initiatives are implemented as pilots, often limited to specific corridors or cities. Though they demonstrate clear results, fragmented implementation and short-term funding restrict their ability to expand or connect to a wider city-level system. As a result, efforts meant to improve public transport, enable safer walking and cycling, and support electric mobility remain isolated rather than forming a coherent, long-term approach to how cities plan and manage movement.
Addressing this gap requires shifting from short-term, project-based interventions to sustained, system-level change by strengthening how funding is accessed, structured, and scaled. This includes working with governments to explore a mix of financing pathways: both innovative instruments, such as green bonds and carbon credits, and conventional funding sources, including engagement with development banks to unlock larger pools of capital.
A key part of this approach is grounding financing in evidence and need. Early impact and budget assessments – such as those conducted in Pimpri Chinchwad – have helped identify critical gaps, particularly in funding for walking and cycling, and have informed initiatives like Harit Setu and Municipal Green Bonds for such infrastructure. At the same time, we are working to reduce risk and attract private participation through mechanisms such as viability gap funding and leasing models to support the scale-up of electric bus fleets in Maharashtra under the Maha Bus Programme.
Scaling these efforts requires strong policy support. We have been supporting governments in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra on policy and procurement frameworks for bus systems to ensure that financing mechanisms are backed by clear, implementable pathways for rollout. This has contributed to large-scale programmes such as the Maha Bus Programme and Tamil Nadu’s ongoing bus modernisation efforts, alongside state-level regulations that embed people-first street design into everyday practice.
At the national level, this work is helping build momentum for a more coordinated, data-driven approach, informing the need for a national streets programme and stronger policy direction for improving how cities plan and fund their transport systems.
Together, this approach aims to unlock funding at scale, strengthen institutional capacity, and ensure that successful interventions are not only expanded, but embedded into long-term planning and policy – so that what works on the ground can be sustained, replicated, and reach more people across cities.
