For generations, navigating Indian cities on foot has never been a straightforward, guaranteed right—it has been a daily battle through a chaotic obstacle course. This personal experience, shared by millions across the country, frames a long-simmering crisis of urban planning that has only recently been thrust into the national spotlight by a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
Growing up in Kolkata, the author navigated sidewalks swallowed entirely by rows of street vendors. A move to Delhi revealed a road network built almost exclusively for private motor vehicles. Now based in Gurugram, the pattern holds: footpaths are often reduced to rubble heaps and garbage dumps, blocked abruptly by parked cars or construction work, or built so high above street level that they are unusable for most people. It was against this backdrop that India’s Supreme Court ruled in June that the right to walk safely on designated footpaths qualifies as a fundamental right—a decision that felt less like overreach and more like common sense arriving 40 years too late.
What makes this systemic neglect particularly striking is that India remains first and foremost a nation of walkers. Census-based estimates put the number of people who commute to work on foot at roughly 45 million, compared to just 5.4 million who travel in private cars, jeeps, or vans. Nearly one in three urban workers walks to their job, and every public transit journey—from bus to metro—begins and ends on foot. When including school trips, daily errands, and shopping runs, walking accounts for the majority of urban mobility: a 2019 survey of major Indian cities found that 63% of all daily journeys are made on foot, making pedestrians the single largest group of road users in the country.
Most of these pedestrians are what researchers term “captive walkers”: people who do not choose to walk out of preference, but because they cannot afford any other mode of transport. Women, low-income workers, and young people are disproportionately dependent on walking, yet this group—who contribute the least to traffic congestion and urban air pollution—faces the highest risk of harm on India’s roads.
The scale of unsafe infrastructure for pedestrians is sobering. Even when formal footpaths exist, they are often cracked, overly narrow, and completely inaccessible to older adults, children, and people with disabilities. They are routinely blocked by parked motorcycles, occupied by informal encroachments, or dug up for utility work with no temporary alternative route. Faded, poorly maintained zebra crossings are largely ignored by motorists, and elevated flyovers speed up car traffic while forcing pedestrians to take dangerous, circuitous detours at ground level.
A landmark 2011 study of six major Indian cities confirmed what pedestrians have long known: India’s streets systematically fail walkers due to consistently poor and unsafe infrastructure. The *Walkability in Indian Cities* report, published by the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia), awarded surveyed cities a median walkability score of just 47 out of 100. The worst conditions were found around public transport hubs—ironically, the very locations where most walking trips begin and end.
As Geetam Tiwari, a leading transport scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, puts it: pedestrians have been “pushed to the margins of the road networks”, forcing them to compete for limited space alongside fast-moving motor vehicles. This neglect has a deadly human cost. Official data records pedestrians as accounting for roughly one-fifth of all road deaths in India, but independent research cited by Tiwari puts the actual share closer to 30% to 40%. Pedestrians are already the second-largest group of road accident fatalities, behind only two-wheeler riders, and in major metro areas including Delhi and Mumbai, they make up more than half of all annual road deaths. A World Bank analysis estimates that road crashes cost India between 3% and 5% of its GDP every year, through lost productivity, emergency healthcare costs, and permanent disability.
The Supreme Court case that led to the ruling grew out of an unthinkable tragedy: a five-year-old boy was crushed by a truck while walking to school alongside his father. In response, the court delivered an unusually impassioned judgment. “Walking is the simplest of the simple human activity, inextricably connected to life,” wrote Justice PS Narasimha. He added that the state carries a core duty to provide safe footpaths as part of its road network, declaring: “The fundamental right to walk on demarcated footpaths shall override the privilege of a motorised vehicle.”
The judgment directly challenges decades of conventional urban planning in India, where progress has long been measured by the number of kilometers of new expressways, flyovers, and elevated corridors built. For generations, streets have been engineered to move motor vehicles as quickly as possible, while the pedestrian— a role every single citizen shares—has been largely erased from urban planning priorities. “People know about the latest cars, but walking has become invisible,” explains Rishi Aggarwal, a Mumbai-based activist who has spent more than a decade working to shift public and policy mindsets.
Through his advocacy group the Walking Project, Aggarwal organizes community walks and public discussions to encourage city residents to re-examine the neglected spaces around them: broken sidewalks, blocked crossings, and unsafe junctions that have become normalized over time. “When people become apathetic, they stop observing the street,” he says. In Mumbai alone, an estimated 15 million walking trips happen every day, and Aggarwal argues that both the footpaths and the millions of dependent pedestrians have been rendered invisible by car-centric planning.
For Rahul Goel, a transportation researcher at IIT Delhi, the root of the crisis lies in broken governance. “Are footpaths maintained and cleaned? Does the city ensure they aren’t encroached upon?” he asks, noting that even in Delhi where many roads are formally built with footpaths, poor upkeep and mismanagement leave most unusable. Poor design exacerbates the problem: cars parked perpendicular to the curb often block or conceal sidewalks, and parking directly on footpaths is a common sight across the country. Many footpaths are too narrow to accommodate peak pedestrian volumes, others are built too high above the road for people with limited mobility to access, and many end abruptly, forcing walkers out onto busy vehicle carriageways. “If the footpath is discontinuous, it’s simply more convenient to keep walking on the road,” Goel notes.
The deeper issue, he argues, is a long-standing misalignment of policy priorities. “Urban transport governance is still centred on moving vehicles. Reducing congestion and maximising road space for motor traffic take precedence over pedestrians,” he says. Civic agencies are often reluctant to widen footpaths because they view existing vehicle lane space as untouchable, a mindset reinforced by public discourse that frames traffic jams as the top urban mobility crisis. Traffic congestion dominates newspaper headlines and social media conversation, pushing authorities to prioritize keeping vehicles moving at all costs. In Delhi, for example, many mid-block pedestrian crossings have been removed and replaced with U-turns to cut vehicle stoppages, forcing pedestrians to use narrow, often poorly maintained foot overbridges to cross the road. “People don’t just need to walk along a road,” says Goel. “They need to be able to cross it safely too.”
This systemic bias has created stark urban inequality. In Gurugram, a high-speed arterial road cuts through dense residential neighborhoods with almost no safe pedestrian crossings, forcing domestic workers, daily wage laborers, and other low-income pedestrians to dodge speeding traffic. Dozens were killed before authorities finally approved construction of footbridges in response to public outcry. Across Indian cities, those who cannot afford private motor vehicles are forced to risk their lives on roads that barely accommodate walking, while car owners claim an ever-growing share of public road space. Walking has increasingly been rebranded as a leisure activity, confined to gated residential communities, urban parks, or gym treadmills—a shift that carries major public health consequences at a time when India is grappling with rising rates of obesity and lifestyle-related disease.
It is clear that transforming walking from a fundamental right on paper to a safe daily reality will require far more than a single court order. “Walking as a fundamental right should lead to pedestrian-friendly cities, not just pedestrian-friendly streets,” Tiwari says. That means a complete rethink of how Indian cities are designed. Many high-income countries have adopted default urban speed limits of 30km/h (20mph) to protect pedestrians, a policy that requires redesigning streets to narrow traffic lanes, alter road surfaces, and add other traffic-calming measures. Tiwari also argues that walking infrastructure needs to accommodate more than just movement: it should include space for street vendors, shaded rest spots for older adults, and even small play areas for children.
In its judgment, the Supreme Court also highlighted the unique cultural and historical role of walking in India, noting that it is far more than just a way to get from one place to another. It can be “necessity for the poor, meditation for some, an act of resistance for others and a path to discovery”. The court also noted that walking was central to India’s freedom struggle—a point echoed by writer Sumana Roy, who points out that India’s modern political history has often unfolded on foot, from Mahatma Gandhi’s iconic Salt March to Dandi to Subhas Chandra Bose’s “Delhi Chalo” movement and countless protest marches that shaped the nation.
For decades, Indian cities have centered their planning around a single question: how do we move more vehicles, faster? The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling has forced urban leaders and residents to ask a far simpler, more fundamental question: how do we let people walk safely? For millions of captive pedestrians across the country, the ask is not extravagant: just an unbroken, usable footpath that can carry them from one end of the street to the other, without risking their lives.
