Nibha Kumari, a resident of Bihar, India’s poorest state, remembers how a bicycle changed her life when she turned 15.

For two years, she cycled from home to school and tutoring and back again on a government-provided bicycle for two hours a day, six days a week.

“If I didn’t have a bike, I probably wouldn’t have been able to finish high school. It changed my life,” says Nibha, now 27.

Nibha, the daughter of a farmer from Begusarai district, was sent to her aunt’s house 10 km away to attend a nearby primary school. Mobility was a challenge for the girls and public transport was unreliable.

When Nibha returned home to attend high school, she hopped on a bicycle and rode along the bumpy village roads to continue her education.

“The girls have gained a lot of confidence since they started cycling to school and to tutoring classes. More and more of them are now going to school. Most of them have free bicycles,” says Bhuvaneshwari Kumari, a health worker in Begusarai.

She is right. A new, peer-reviewed study The study, published in the Journal of Transport Geography, reveals remarkable findings about schoolchildren and cycling in rural India.

According to the study by Srishti Agrawal, Adit Seth and Rahul Goel, the largest increase in cycling in India has been among rural girls, whose share has more than doubled from 4.5% in 2007 to 11% in 2017, narrowing the gender gap in the activity.

“This is a silent revolution. We call it a revolution because the number of girls cycling has increased in a country where there is a huge gender inequality when it comes to women’s mobility outside the home in general and cycling in particular,” says Ms Agrawal.

Government programs to distribute free bicycles since 2004 have targeted girls, who are more likely to drop out of school than boys due to household chores and strenuous long walks. This approach is not unique to India – countries such as Colombia, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe also show that bicycles are effective in increasing girls’ enrollment and attendance. But the scale is unmatched here.

The three researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai analyzed the transportation options for school-age children between the ages of 5 and 17 based on a nationwide education study. They looked at the effectiveness of government programs that provide students with free bicycles and examined their influence on the bicycle riding rate.

They found that nationwide, the proportion of all students who cycle to school increased from 6.6% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2017.

In rural areas, the number of cycle trips to school has doubled over the decade, while in urban areas it has remained unchanged. Indian urban roads are notoriously unsafe, and the low cycle trips to school in the city are due to poor road safety and more cars on the roads.

India’s cycling revolution is strongest in the villages, with states like Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and Chhattisgarh leading the growth. These states have populations comparable to some of the largest European countries. According to the study, cycling is used more frequently for longer distances in rural areas than in urban areas.

India only began recording cycling behaviour with the last census in 2011. Only 20% of those who commute outside the home to work said that cycling was their main mode of transport. But people in villages cycled more (21%) than in cities (17%).

In addition, more working men (21.7%) cycled to work than women (4.7%). “In international comparison, this gender gap in cycling is one of the highest in the world,” says Ms. Agrawal.

The American women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony once said that the bicycle has “contributed more to the emancipation of women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and independence.”

Researchers wonder whether women cycle less as they get older because job opportunities are reduced and they drop out of the workforce. Nibha stopped cycling after she got married and moved in with her in-laws. While she is training to be a teacher, she still cycles outside the home, but when asked about her commute, she simply says, “I don’t need the bike anymore.”