Indian transport planning has come to embody the logic of a city built around motorised movement. Walking has increasingly been pushed to the margins of transport planning, public investment and, ultimately, the city itself. People on foot are treated as obstacles to the movement of vehicles rather than as equal users of public roads. This reflects decades of public policy that have prioritised vehicles over the people who use streets and roads.
In June 2026, the Supreme Court of India challenged this system. In Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz v. P. Ayyappan, the Court held that the right to walk on a safe, demarcated footpath is a fundamental right under Article 19(1)(d), read with Article 21. It described this right as “primary in nature”, carrying priority over motorised vehicular movement. The judgment gives explicit constitutional recognition to a freedom that Indian transport law and urban governance have long treated as incidental.
Why India’s Transport Laws Privilege Vehicles
This imbalance has a traceable institutional history. Road design, parking requirements and licensing regimes are often presented as technical responses to traffic growth. Together, they reinforce what sociologist John Urry called “automobility”: the organisation of infrastructure, regulation and urban life around the private vehicle.
India’s transport laws reflect the same logic. The Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, and its predecessor enacted in 1939 were principally designed to standardise, license and regulate motorised transport. Within this framework, pedestrians appear chiefly as vulnerable road users to whom motorists owe limited duties, or as claimants after an accident—not as holders of an affirmative right to safe pedestrian infrastructure.
The Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017, formally recognise pedestrians as road users and direct drivers to exercise caution near crossings and intersections. Yet these provisions remain instructions to motorists rather than enforceable entitlements for people on foot.
The result is a legal framework that regulates vehicles far more comprehensively than it protects pedestrians – a gap the Supreme Court has now asked governments to address.
The human consequences of this vehicle-centred system are visible in India’s pedestrian fatality figures. According to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, more than 1.8 lakh pedestrians were killed on Indian roads between 2019 and 2024, an annual average of over 30,500 deaths. Around 31 percent occurred on national highways. In 2024 alone, 36,526 pedestrians were killed, accounting for more than one-fifth of all road fatalities. These figures expose a transport system that has measured mobility more readily through vehicle speed and volume than through pedestrian safety.
Footpaths Shape Access to Work and Public Life
The judgment also expands the constitutional conversation around walking. It recognises the freedom to walk as integral to the exercise of other rights, including expression, assembly, association and protest. Walking is therefore not merely a mode of transport or a question of road safety. It is part of the everyday exercise of citizenship.
This recognition matters because walking remains central to urban mobility in India. Census 2011 commuting data show that walking and cycling accounted for nearly half of work journeys among the urban workers covered by the dataset. Despite their age, these remain the latest nationwide census-based figures on modes of travel to work.
Dependence on walking is also unevenly distributed. A 2022 World Bank toolkit reported that 45.4 percent of women in Indian cities walked to work, compared with 27.4 percent of men. Research on walking in Delhi has similarly documented that many low-income residents walk because no affordable alternative is available.
Women frequently combine work, caregiving and household errands within journeys that link walking with public transport. When footpaths are unsafe or discontinuous, these journeys become slower and riskier, constraining access to employment.
Pedestrian infrastructure therefore shapes access to work, education, healthcare and civic life. The quality of a city’s footpaths determines not only how safely people move, but also how fully they can participate in urban life.
Building Institutions for Walking Rights
The judgment identifies a central institutional deficit: India has neither a dedicated statutory framework nor a full-time regulator capable of protecting the right to walk. Drawing on rights-based laws governing education, food security and access to information, the Court points towards an institution built around continuity, expertise, independence and accountability.
Naming the deficit is the easier half. The task before the Union and state governments is to create an institution with the authority to turn the right to walk into enforceable duties for public agencies.
Four steps should follow.
First, the proposed pedestrian regulator requires a statutory basis, an identifiable budget and a clear timeline for establishment. It should not become another advisory committee without enforcement powers. The law must allocate responsibility across different levels and agencies of government and empower the regulator to prescribe minimum standards for safe, continuous and accessible pedestrian infrastructure.
Second, these standards must move from advisory guidelines into binding planning rules, road contracts and municipal by-laws. Road projects should not be considered complete merely because the carriageway has been constructed or resurfaced. Private developments affecting street frontages should also be required to comply with prescribed footpath and accessibility standards before receiving completion or occupancy approvals.
Third, pedestrian infrastructure needs identifiable and protected financing. Municipal budgets commonly subsume footpath construction and maintenance within broader road works, leaving expenditure fragmented and difficult to track. States should require urban local bodies and road-owning agencies to create separate budget heads for pedestrian infrastructure and publicly report allocations, expenditure and completed works.
Fourth, accountability needs a public face. Residents should be able to report missing, damaged or obstructed footpaths through a statutory grievance mechanism that identifies the responsible agency, requires a time-bound response and allows unresolved complaints to be escalated.
Municipal corporations and road-owning agencies should also publish regular pedestrian safety and accessibility audits. These should assess the continuity, accessibility and safety of pedestrian networks rather than merely recording fatalities. Their findings should carry corrective deadlines and consequences for persistent non-compliance.
None of this requires a further expansion of constitutional doctrine. It requires India’s institutions of urban governance to treat walking as a protected mode of movement rather than a residual use of the road.
The Supreme Court has established the constitutional principle. Its enduring legacy will depend on whether governments convert that principle into binding standards, identifiable budgets, accountable institutions and remedies that citizens can actually invoke.