Intervue for Product enterprises
Hire top engineers company-wide in minutes
Intervue for IT Services
Conduct seamless coding interviews for IT talent pipelines
Intervue for IT Staffing
Boost recruiter efficiency and productivity at scale
Intervue for Startups
Scale your tech teams fast with minimal effort
Intervue for Universities/Colleges
Simplify university hiring with scalable tech screening
India's biggest engineering hub is also, officially, the world's second-most congested city. We pulled the 2025 traffic numbers for ten Indian metros and did the arithmetic on what all that gridlock actually costs: in office visits, interview loops, and ordinary Tuesdays.
01: The setup
Bengaluru and Pune don't just top India's traffic tables: they sit second and fifth on the planet, ahead of São Paulo, Manila, and Jakarta. Between them, they're also home to a large share of the country's engineering workforce: the people who get on calls, walk into panel interviews, and commute to campuses across exactly this traffic.
That overlap is the whole premise of this page. Every commute number below is public. The interview-loop math is ours: a way of translating an abstract percentage into something closer to a lived Tuesday morning.
02: The dataset
Every year, TomTom scores traffic in roughly 500 cities worldwide using anonymised GPS data: 3.6 trillion km of it in 2025 alone. "Congestion level" measures how much slower real driving is than free-flow conditions: a score of 74% means a trip that should take 20 minutes takes almost 35.
Congestion level, 2025
% slower than free-flow · sorted high to low
Eight of these ten cities rank inside the world's top 50 for congestion, more than any other single country places on the list. New Delhi, at 23rd globally, is the surprise: high on the percentage table, but its wide arterial roads mean drivers there actually lose the fewest hours of anyone on this list, as the next chart shows.
03: The real unit
Congestion level is a ratio; "hours lost per year" is TomTom's estimate of the actual time a typical driver burns sitting in that slowdown, annually. Re-sorted by this number, the city order shuffles: Kolkata and Chennai's narrower, more tangled roads cost commuters more real time than their percentage ranking suggests.
Hours lost to congestion per year, 2025
one row per city · each dot ≈ a day of congestion, piling up
Each row is one city's year of congestion, dot by dot: every dot stands in for roughly a day's worth of it, piled up left to right until the pile reads as "more" or "less" than the row above and below. It isn't a literal daily log (TomTom doesn't publish per-day figures), and the placement of any single dot means nothing; only the total next to each row is real, and it's the same number in the table below.
168 hours is a full work month, spent entirely stationary.
04: The interview math
A separate, city-specific number helps ground this: MoveInSync's Q1 2025 commute survey of GCC and tech-sector employees put Bengaluru's average one-way office commute at 50 minutes. That's before any traffic delay is added, just the baseline trip.
Doing the arithmetic
Bengaluru, tech workforce, 2025
In other words: the traffic delay alone (not the commute itself, just the part wasted sitting still) is equivalent to 101 extra round-trips to the office, every year, for every commuter in the city. That's before anyone has actually gone anywhere they needed to be.
each route-loop ≈ one round trip's worth of pure delay · 101 of 400 shown lit
An onsite technical interview loop is, at minimum, one of these round trips, often two or three, spread across screening and panel rounds. None of that travel time shows up on a scorecard. It just quietly taxes the day of whoever made the trip, candidate or interviewer.
05: Why we're pointing this out
The traffic data does that on its own. Intervue runs structured technical interviews over video, which means the 100-minute round trip above simply doesn't happen for the rounds we run. We're not claiming that erases Bengaluru's traffic problem: nothing about interview format fixes 500 cities' worth of road capacity. But for the specific 100 minutes a candidate or panelist would otherwise spend getting to and from one interview, it's minutes back.
Make of that what you will. The numbers above are public and linked below if you want to check our arithmetic, or run it for your own city and your own commute.
06: The full table
| City | Global rank | Congestion | YoY change | Hours lost / yr |
|---|
Global rank out of ~500 cities scored worldwide. "N/A" indicates a city outside the global top 50 (still ranked nationally). Source: TomTom Traffic Index 2025.
