India’s Supreme Court Recognised the Right to Walk. Will Cities Redesign the Street?
India’s Supreme Court has recognised the right to walk safely. Will Indian cities now give pedestrians more space than parked cars?
India is a nation of walkers, but many Indian cities still design their streets as if pedestrians are an inconvenience. Around 45 million people walk to work every day, according to census-based estimates, compared with about 5.4 million who commute in private cars, jeeps, or vans.[1] Every bus and metro journey also begins and ends on foot. Yet the person walking to work, school, a market, or a station is often given the narrowest, most broken, and least protected strip of public space.
That contradiction has now acquired constitutional significance. In June 2026, the Supreme Court recognised the right to walk safely on designated footpaths as a fundamental right. The judgment challenges an urban-planning culture that has repeatedly treated vehicle movement as the primary purpose of a street and walking as a residual activity.[1] The decision creates a powerful question for city governments: if walking is a right, can a footpath remain optional, discontinuous, encroached upon, or unusable?
The debate is not simply about cars versus pedestrians. It includes street vendors, cyclists, delivery workers, buses, emergency vehicles, parking, utility agencies, accessibility, and the everyday economy of the city. Reclaiming the footpath without planning for these competing needs can produce new conflicts. But preserving the current hierarchy—where parked vehicles and fast traffic routinely occupy pedestrian space—is no longer defensible.
Why walking is the largest urban transport story
Walking is often missing from transport statistics because it is not ticketed, fuelled, or represented by a large industry. But its presence is visible everywhere. A person walking from a home to a bus stop is making a transport trip. A child walking to school is using the street network. A domestic worker crossing a high-speed arterial to reach a job is participating in the metropolitan economy.
The BBC reports that nearly a third of urban workers walk to work and cites a 2019 survey of selected cities in which 63% of journeys were made on foot.[1] These figures make a narrow definition of “mobility” look absurd. If the majority of everyday movement is walking or begins with walking, then pedestrian infrastructure is not a beautification project. It is basic transport infrastructure.
Walking is also an equity issue. People who cannot afford a car or motorcycle have less ability to avoid dangerous streets. Women, older people, children, persons with disabilities, and informal workers may depend on walking more heavily while having fewer alternatives when the footpath disappears. A city that makes walking unsafe is effectively charging its poorest residents a higher price for access to work and public services.
The legal shift: from courtesy to public duty
In Maniyar Iliyaz v. P Ayyappan, decided on June 19, 2026, the Supreme Court linked safe walking to the constitutional guarantees of free movement under Article 19(1)(d) and life and personal liberty under Article 21.[2] The judgment, as reported by Down To Earth, treated the right to walk on safe, demarcated footpaths as a fundamental right and directed Union ministries and the Law Commission to examine a broader statutory framework.[2]
This matters because it changes the administrative question. Authorities can no longer treat a footpath as an optional edge detail after the carriageway, flyover, parking lane, drain, and utility corridor have been designed. The question becomes whether the road-owning agency has fulfilled a public duty to provide safe, continuous, and accessible movement for people on foot.
Law alone will not repair a broken street. The ruling must be translated into project requirements, budgets, audits, maintenance contracts, enforcement systems, and accountability. Otherwise, the right to walk will exist in court orders while remaining absent from the daily experience of citizens.
Why Indian footpaths fail
1. The footpath is treated as leftover space
Many street sections are designed by first fixing the maximum space for moving and parking vehicles. The remaining margin is labelled “footpath,” even if it is too narrow, discontinuous, exposed to traffic, or interrupted by trees, poles, ramps, utility boxes, and construction debris. This is not a design error at the edge of the project; it is a priority error at the beginning of the project.
2. Continuity is sacrificed at every property boundary
A footpath can be beautifully paved in front of one building and become an obstacle course at the next gate. Driveway ramps, basement entrances, compound walls, shop extensions, road cuts, and stormwater crossings break the walking line. For a wheelchair user, child, or older person, a path that ends abruptly is not a partial success. It is a failed network.
3. Parking silently captures public space
Parking on footpaths is often normalised because it is less politically difficult than managing vehicle ownership. The result is that the vehicle receives a secure space while the pedestrian is pushed into the carriageway. The same logic appears when road projects widen lanes by narrowing sidewalks or when flyovers remove a safe surface crossing and replace it with stairs or a distant footbridge.
4. Vendors and pedestrians are placed in conflict
Street vending is part of the urban economy, and the Street Vendors Act provides a framework for protecting livelihoods through Town Vending Committees and mapped vending zones.[2] When cities fail to design space for vendors, pedestrians, loading activity, and access, the conflict is blamed on the vendor or the pedestrian. Good street design should separate the clear walking zone from a managed frontage or vending zone instead of criminalising livelihoods and compromising safety at the same time.
5. Maintenance is invisible until a person is injured
Even a well-designed footpath becomes unsafe when paving breaks, drains remain open, lights fail, crossings fade, or construction barricades occupy the walkway for months. Maintenance responsibility is often divided among road agencies, municipal bodies, utility providers, contractors, and traffic police. A person does not experience these institutional boundaries; they experience one dangerous street.
What a people-first street should provide
Down To Earth reports an Indian Roads Congress benchmark of a continuous, unobstructed pedestrian zone at least 1.8 metres wide, supported by a one-metre multi-utility or furniture zone for trees, lights, and vendors.[2] The exact dimensions should be adapted to local movement volumes and street context, but the principle is clear: the walking zone must remain continuous and unobstructed.
| Street element | Minimum planning question | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| Walking zone | Can two people, including wheelchair users, pass without entering traffic? | Provide a continuous, accessible, obstruction-free path with safe surface levels. |
| Crossing network | Can a person cross at the place where the trip naturally requires it? | Use frequent, visible, at-grade crossings with refuge areas and short crossing distances. |
| Shade and rest | Can children, older people, and heat-exposed workers walk and pause comfortably? | Provide street trees, shaded seating, drinking water where appropriate, and climate-responsive materials. |
| Vending and frontage | Can livelihoods operate without blocking the clear walking line? | Map vending and loading zones, provide service access, and manage time-based use. |
| Traffic speed | Does the street allow a human error without producing a fatal result? | Use traffic calming, raised tables, tighter junctions, lower urban speeds, and protected crossings. |
| Maintenance | Who will inspect, clean, repair, and enforce the street after opening day? | Assign one accountable agency, publish service standards, and fund maintenance over the asset life. |
The difficult argument: should cars lose space?
Yes, in many locations—but the decision should be evidence-based and transparent. Street space is finite. If a city promises continuous footpaths, bus priority, cycle tracks, trees, drainage, vending, loading, and parking on the same narrow right-of-way without changing the geometry, it is making an impossible promise.
Reallocation may mean removing parking from a footpath, narrowing a vehicle lane, introducing a one-way street, relocating loading to specific hours, or reducing vehicle speeds. It may also mean accepting that a central business street cannot provide unlimited free parking while remaining walkable. These changes will create opposition because the benefits are distributed across thousands of pedestrians while the inconvenience is concentrated among particular drivers and businesses.
The answer is not to avoid the decision. It is to make the trade-off visible. Every major street project should publish a street-space budget showing how much space is allocated to walking, crossing, cycling, public transport, moving vehicles, parking, vending, loading, trees, drainage, and utilities. If the pedestrian share is zero or residual, the city should have to explain why.
India already has practical examples
India’s Streets for People Challenge demonstrated that pedestrian-priority projects do not have to begin with expensive permanent construction. MoHUA reported that 38 cities piloted street re-imaginations, transforming more than 400 kilometres of corridors through temporary solutions, collecting feedback from more than 60,000 citizens, and involving more than 1,800 design professionals, students, and other organisations.[3]
The programme’s scale-up agenda included healthy streets and parking policies, area-level parking plans, permanent interventions, and institutional capacity through Healthy Streets Departments.[3] The lesson is valuable: tactical trials can help cities test traffic circulation, vending arrangements, crossing locations, shade, seating, and public response before committing to a permanent design.
Chennai’s non-motorised transport policy and the pedestrian improvements described in recent reporting show another route: give walking and cycling a defined share of the transport budget rather than leaving them to discretionary funds.[2] Pimpri-Chinchwad’s green municipal bond for non-motorised transport illustrates how pedestrian and cycling networks can be framed as investable urban infrastructure rather than decorative additions.
From a footpath mandate to a city-wide walking system
The Supreme Court ruling should not produce isolated footpaths outside individual projects. It should create a connected walking system. That requires mapping desire lines, schools, markets, bus stops, metro stations, hospitals, workplaces, informal settlements, public toilets, and areas where pedestrian crashes occur. The city can then prioritise continuous routes instead of distributing small beautification works without network logic.
Walkability audits should be independent enough to challenge the road-owning agency. They should be completed before design approval, after construction, and during operation. A road should not be considered complete because the asphalt is finished. It is complete when a child, older person, wheelchair user, vendor, delivery worker, and commuter can all use the public realm without being forced into dangerous conflict.
Accessibility must also be treated as a core design requirement. Tactile paths, gentle ramps, readable crossings, unobstructed widths, audible signals where appropriate, and safe kerb transitions benefit people with disabilities while improving the street for everyone. Universal design is not an expensive extra; it is a test of whether the city understands the public as diverse human users rather than an abstract traffic flow.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Indian cities do not need to make people walk. Millions already walk because the city depends on them. The task is to stop making walking dangerous.
A safe footpath may appear less glamorous than a flyover or elevated corridor, but it performs a more fundamental urban function: it connects people to the city at human speed. It supports public transport, local commerce, health, social contact, childhood independence, and equal access to opportunity.
The real test of the Supreme Court’s judgment will not be the number of new footpaths announced. It will be whether cities are willing to remove vehicles from pedestrian space, protect vendor livelihoods through design, fund maintenance, slow traffic, and hold road-owning agencies accountable for the public realm they create.
So should Indian cities take space away from cars to give it back to people? In streets where pedestrians are already the majority users, the more honest question is: why was that space ever treated as belonging primarily to vehicles?
References
[1] Soutik Biswas, BBC, “India is a nation of walkers - but its cities forgot them,” August 6, 2026.
[2] Anumita Roychowdhury, Down To Earth, “Reclaim the footpath,” July 17, 2026.
[4] Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Government of India, “Road Accidents in India.”
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