During one routine school morning, a father and his five-year-old son were walking along the edge of a busy asphalt road because their neighbourhood lacked a safe footpath. In an instant, the child was hit by a water tanker. The young boy’s death left a grieving family and exposed the chronic failure of urban planning that claims the lives of pedestrians with grim regularity.
What began in the high court as a narrow dispute over insurance liability for a road accident culminated in a landmark Supreme Court judgement on June 19, 2026. The case of Maniyar Iliyaz v. P Ayyappan saw Justices P S Narasimha and A S Chandurkar go well beyond the question of compensation and declare that the right to walk on safe, demarcated footpaths is a fundamental right protected under Part III of the Constitution.
The bench also converted the broader constitutional question into an ongoing suo motu proceeding, titled “Re: Fundamental Right to Walk and Footpath”. It directed the Union ministries of housing and urban affairs, rural development, and road transport and highways, to examine a comprehensive statutory framework. The Law Commission of India is directed to identify the state’s duties and provide effective remedies to ensure safe walking conditions. The apex court observed that a regulatory mechanism is necessary to enforce this right, establishing that citizens can now seek constitutional remedies and compensation directly from the authorities responsible.
The ruling makes clear that the constitutional guarantee of freedom of movement cannot be reduced to movement on wheels. If a road exists, local authorities have an enforceable constitutional duty to construct and maintain an accompanying footpath, and this right must override the privilege of motorised transport. The ruling expands jurisprudence by anchoring the right to walk within the guarantee of free movement under Article 19(1)(d) and the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21. The bench recognised that walking is not merely a mode of travel but an essential part of expression, assembly and association, like traditional neighbourhood processions where communities reclaim public spaces.
The judgement comes amid an unacceptable high toll of accidents on Indian roads. Data from the Union ministry of road transport and highways reportedly show that road crashes claim around 175,000 lives each year, with pedestrians bearing a disproportionate share of the toll. In 2024, as many as 36,526 pedestrians were killed, representing 20.6 per cent of all road fatalities. Combined with two-wheeler riders, these vulnerable road users accounted for 67 per cent of all street-level mortality. Put differently, two of every three people killed on India’s roads were either pedestrians or two-wheeler users.
The court ruling exposes both a legal and a governance gap. The Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, was drafted primarily with motor vehicles in mind, treating human interests as incidental. By prioritising the speed and throughput of personal cars, actual road development has marginalised the majority of citizens who commute on foot, increasing daily safety hazards.
There is a variety of central codes and guidelines that theoretically protect public spaces. But these frameworks are treated as discretionary rather than binding mandates. In addition to the Central Motor Vehicles Rules (CMVR), other legislations related to disability, street vendors and livelihood have a direct bearing on footpaths and pedestrian rights. For instance, CMVR explicitly bars parking on footpaths. Similarly, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, demands barrier-free environments under Sections 40 and 41, mandating guidelines that require tactile paths for the visually impaired and gentle curb ramps at junctions. Any street excluding these elements is non-compliant, yet local agencies routinely build inaccessible infrastructure.
The Street Vendors Act, 2014, seeks to protect the right to livelihood under Article 19(1)(g) and Article 21 by mandating Town Vending Committees to map cities into distinct zones. When urban authorities neglect to design functional streets, intense conflict arises between the pedestrian’s safety and the vendor’s economic survival, even though both rights stem from the same core constitutional guarantee of dignity.
Technically, engineering manuals like the Indian Roads Congress (IRC) guidelines provide specifications to resolve these spatial conflicts. The code for sidewalks requires a continuous, unobstructed pedestrian zone, at least 1.8-metre wide, to allow two wheelchairs to pass safely. This path must have a minimum 1-metre multi-utility furniture zone to isolate streetlights, trees and street vendors from the walking lane. It also requires a frontage zone buffer against building walls and caps the sidewalk kerb height low so that the elderly and children can easily step onto it, providing technical benchmark for interconnected, walkable neighbourhoods.
Yet, because these design manuals are treated as optional, municipalities and public works departments continue to build fractured, sub-standard streets without facing legal consequences. The existing legal provisions have failed to prevent the systematic surrender of pedestrian spaces to vehicular carriageways and parking.
In light of the new Supreme Court ruling, it may now become possible for citizens to enforce accountability by lodging formal petitions against authorities, filing statutory complaints, such as with the Disability Commissioner, or seeking civil damages for public misfeasance under the law of torts.
Experts lament that cities like Delhi continue to spend extensively on car-centric flyovers, underpasses and foot overbridges, while completely disregarding the Union housing ministry’s calls for analysing alternative transit solutions. This violates the pedestrian-first principles upheld by the Supreme Court.
Geetam Tiwari, Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre, applauds the Supreme Court’s ruling as long overdue in a country where the majority walk. She warns that without a statutory framework to make walkability legally enforceable—complete with compliance monitoring and penalties for implementing agencies—the fundamental right to walk will remain a non-starter. Despite the National Urban Transport Policy, 2006, and other legal provisions, pedestrian infrastructure failed to attain scale.
The weakest link is the lack of a clear mandate for road-building agencies to prioritise human centric design. Even frameworks like the IRC guidelines are biased towards vehicular carriageway design over walkways. As Adarsha Kapoor, urban designer with Creative Footprint, points out, there is no law or code that prioritises construction of footpaths over construction of carriageways, leaving an institutional vacuum that fails to guarantee pedestrian infrastructure even when space is highly constrained.
The supreme court recognised that walking is not merely a mode of travel but an essential part of expression, assembly and association, like traditional neighbourhood processions
To operationalise the right to walk, people-friendly urban design must be made legally mandatory. Advisory engineering codes must be converted into binding regulations, ensuring no detailed project report for a new road or flyover receives financial approval or environmental clearance without an independent walkability audit. Road-owning agencies and approving bodies must be held directly liable for bad engineering; under Section 198A of the Motor Vehicles Act, designated authorities, engineers, and contractors can face criminal and financial penalties if safety standards are not adhered to.
Kapoor adds that most road safety organisations focus strictly on safer traffic movement rather than unhindered, safe walking. This makes it critical for IRC to prioritise pedestrian design within initial requests for proposals (RFPs) and municipal budgets. Experts also question the policy obsession with increasing the speed of vehicles in cities. Tiwari notes countries like the UK, Sweden and France are limiting urban speed limits to 30 kilometres per hour to eliminate unsafe modal conflicts and save human lives.
Experts emphasise that the right to walk cannot be sustained without dedicated financial backing. Non-motorised transit has often failed to attract adequate capital. There is no system currently to earmark a share of road investments specifically for walking infrastructure. Urban planners like Sarika Panda Bhatt, head of Raahgiri Foundation that is involved with development of walkable streets in Gurugram, say independent walkability audits and safe pedestrian spaces cannot remain an afterthought; instead, they must become an integral part of road project designs and their initial budgeting.
While cities continue spending on car-centric infrastructure, the only framework currently providing for non-motorised infrastructure is the Metro Rail Policy, 2017. This policy mandates pedestrian infrastructure within a 200-500 square-metre radius around stations as a condition for states seeking central performance-linked funding. While networks like Kochi Metro and Nagpur Metro have integrated this layout, the mechanism remains localised to transit hubs and is not yet scalable, so a city-wide network is needed for continuous sidewalk across an entire urban area. Sujata Hingorani, principal of landscape architecture at Oasis Designs Inc, emphasises that any RFP for road projects and subsequent budget sanctions must explicitly specify essential pedestrian-centric footpath and crossing designs.
Non-motorised transit has often failed to attract adequate capital. There is no system currently to earmark a share of road investments specifically for walking infrastructure
State-level funding strategies for upgrading walking infrastructure remain rare, but are emerging. Chennai adopted India’s first non-motorised transport policy in 2014, committing 60 per cent of its transport budget to walking and cycling. The city redesigned street networks, upgraded hundreds of bus stops and secured school zones—initiatives now scaling across six neighbourhoods via the World Bank-backed Mega Streets Project.
Shreya Gadepalli, founder of the Urban Works Institute previously associated with the Chennai project, notes that such street-level transformations require building deep, bottom-up awareness to secure lasting political and public support. She cautions that scalable action cannot run on auto-mode unless the full lifecycle of street projects—including design, construction and maintenance—plays out fully with earmarked budgets over a sustained period of time. The challenge also lies in building the necessary technical skill, capacity and specialised design support directly within civic agencies.
Financially, Pimpri-Chinchwad has broken new ground by launching India’s first green municipal bond explicitly ear-marked for non-motorised transport. The municipal corporation raised Rs 200 crore for its ambitious Harit Setu (Green Connectivity) Masterplan, turning pedestrian and cycling networks into investable assets. Similarly, Srinagar leveraged its Smart City budget to redesign a nearly 100-kilometre pedestrian infrastructure network.
Can the Supreme Court’s ruling finally mark the end of an era where footpaths are treated as an afterthought? A nascent state-level precedent exists. In 2022, the Punjab and Haryana High Court issued directives requiring road-owning bodies to prioritise pedestrian safety under Article 21 of the Constitution. Thereafter, Punjab became the first state to legally re-quire all construction and expansion projects by agencies like National Highways Authority of India and state public works departments to include dedicated footpaths and cycle tracks.
Navdeep Asija, traffic advisor to the Punjab government appointed by the high court, notes that while the state has in-itiated this transformation, the new Supreme Court judgement must be backed by a strong, independent and decentralised system at the state level that possesses the necessary knowledge, accountability, funds and decision-making power. Now that the apex court has provided the constitutional mandate, city and regional authorities must be accountable to deliver primary dignity to pedestrians.
This article was originally published in the July 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth