On June 19, 2026, the Supreme Court of India did what the country's policymakers and planners had failed to do for three-quarters of a century: it looked at the Indian street and named the injustice built into its very cross-section. The right to walk, a Bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Atul S. Chandurkar held, is a fundamental right under Part III of the Constitution — flowing from the freedom of movement in Article 19(1)(d), read with the freedoms of speech, assembly and association, and the right to life under Article 21.

Then came the sentence that should reorganise how every Indian city spends its money: "These rights are primary and shall have priority over movement by motorised vehicles."

The case began, as these things often do in India, with a death. A father set out to walk his five-year-old son to a nearby school, as millions do every morning. A tanker struck the child from behind and crushed him. Refusing to treat the tragedy as private misfortune, the Court observed: "Accidents like this continue to occur, perhaps they are inevitable till we restructure our rights regime as regards access to roads and recognise their correlative duties."

And it made the remedy structural: "If the road exists, there is a duty to ensure that there are demarcated and well-maintained footpaths for walkers."

That is the charter. The rest of this piece is an argument for taking it literally.

Key Arithmetic

For decades, Indian cities have been planned around a population that barely exists. The car-owning commuter, for whom flyovers are flown and roads widened, is a minority. The walker, the cyclist, the bus passenger, and the street vendor are the majority, and they have been planned against.

The numbers are unambiguous. The Ministry of Urban Development's 2008 study — Wilbur Smith Associates' survey of thirty representative cities — measured how Indians actually move, and the pattern is inverse of how cities are built.

 

The lesson is plain. Walking is the largest or near-largest mode in almost every city, big or small.

The 2011 Census found around a third of working Indians walk or cycle to work; and once the walking that begins and ends, every transit trip is counted, walking makes up the majority of urban commutes. Nearly 45% of people walk less than five kilometres to work, and more women walk than men.

Set that against where the money goes. Footpaths, where they exist, run along barely 30% of urban roads. Tiwari's verdict on Indian road design is precise: the "fundamental flaw" is a road geometry built solely for "the smooth flow of motorised transport," reducing the pedestrian — the largest single category of road user — to a "helpless trundler".

A Subsidy Paid In Blood

The skew is counted in bodies. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways recorded 1,77,175 road deaths in 2024 — about 485 a day, the highest annual toll ever logged, and rising faster than the number of crashes. Pedestrians accounted for 20.6% and two-wheeler riders for 46.2%: together, more than two-thirds of all road deaths were of those with the least metal around them. India's pedestrian toll alone exceeds the combined road fatalities of the European Union and Japan. Tiwari notes that pedestrians are 30–35% of road deaths nationally, but nearly 65% in cities.

Delhi still leads in total deaths; Bengaluru — where speeding causes nearly nine in ten road deaths — now tops the country in pedestrian fatalities for the second year running.

The convenience of the motorist is purchased with the lives of the poor because it is the poor who walk — the homeless on pavements never built, the worker crossing six lanes because no crossing was provided, the child on a missing footpath.

A missing footpath is no longer municipal negligence; it is, after June 19, a breach of fundamental rights.

Reimagining The Road

If the judgment is to mean anything, it must overturn the engineering doctrine that treats the footpath as residual space — the strip left over once the carriageway has taken what it wants. The hierarchy must be inverted: the design of an Indian street should begin with the pedestrian and the cyclist, give them safe, continuous, shaded, and adequately wide space as a non-negotiable first claim, and only then distribute what remains among buses and private vehicles.

This is a demand to redirect the capital budget: the money that funds an urban flyover — which induces more car traffic while severing neighbourhoods — could build hundreds of kilometres of footpath, cycle track and safe crossing that serve the actual majority. The footpath is also the workplace of the informal economy and the last refuge of the homeless; to leave it unbuilt is now, additionally, unconstitutional.

Compact City — Without Gentrification

The corrective, well understood and badly implemented, is Transit-Oriented Development (TOD): dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods clustered around mass transit (road and rail based), where homes, work, schools and markets sit within walking distance and the daily trip is short by design.

But TOD in India carries a poison that must be named and neutralised. Wherever transit raises land value, it raises rents, and the low-income residents who depend most on public transport and walking are the first to be priced out — the gentrification already visible around Delhi's and Bengaluru's transit corridors.

A TOD that becomes an enclave for the affluent betrays its own purpose, relocating the poor to a further, more car-dependent edge. The reform India needs is compact urbanism with an anti-gentrification spine welded in: mandatory — not optional — affordable housing in every TOD zone, rehabilitation clauses for existing residents and vendors, and land-value capture that finances inclusion rather than rewarding the developer.

Hierarchy of Mobility, Right Way Up

The most expensive confusion in Indian urban mobility policy is the belief that public transport means metro rail. The metro has become the default aspiration of every city, absorbing capital on a scale that distorts the entire urban mobility budget — and the ridership has not come. Most Indian metros run at a quarter to a third of projected ridership. Mumbai's underground Aqua Line (Metro 3) cost around ₹37,000 crore; even after its full 33.5-kilometre corridor opened in late 2025, it carries roughly 1.4 lakh weekday passengers, well short of the four-lakh projected.

Bengaluru now has the most expensive metro fares in the country — beyond the reach not only of the middle-income commuters it was meant to attract but of the poor and marginalised who most need affordable mobility.

The hierarchy must be set right way up.

At its base sits walking — universal, free, now constitutionally protected; above it, cycling, needing only safe tracks. Above that, the workhorse of any affordable city: the public bus — which MoHUA's own service-level benchmarks set at 40 to 60 per lakh of population, a bar most Indian cities fail to clear — and its bus rapid transit variants, moving large numbers at a fraction of metro cost and deployable in months, not decades. Intermediate public transport — the auto, the shared cab, the e-rickshaw — fills the last mile.

Metro rail belongs at the apex, justified only on the densest trunk corridors where nothing else can carry the load, and even then, integrated with everything beneath it.

India has built this pyramid upside down, lavishing money on the apex while the base — footpath, bus, cycle track — is starved. The result is the worst of all outcomes: public transport's share of trips, the Centre for Science and Environment projects, falling from over 75% at the turn of the century towards 45% by the early 2030s, as private vehicles fill the vacuum.

The Duty

The Court did not stop at declaring walking a fundamental right. It assigned the duty — to urban development authorities, municipal corporations, municipalities and panchayats — and ordered the case re-registered as a continuing constitutional matter, "Re: Fundamental Right to Walk and Footpath," with the Union government's ministries impleaded and the Law Commission tasked to design a statutory framework, identify duty-bearers and provide remedies.

Every budget that funds another city flyover before a footpath network, every master plan that zones for sprawl while neglecting transit, every metro sanctioned where a bus system would serve more people for less, is now vulnerable to a citizen's writ.

The city must belong first to the person on foot.