A 73-year-old woman on a footpath in Kerala’s Kozhikode became the face of India’s aspirational walking class resistance when she stood squarely in the path of a two-wheeler rider on a footpath. The viral video showing her refusing to grant the wayward scooterist an inch even caught the eye of the Motor Vehicles Department and the police, whose job it is to keep the roads safe. Unfortunately, internet fame and influence are fleeting, and Prabhavati Amma’s refusal to blink is unlikely to sustain a nationwide pedestrian movement to reclaim footpaths and zebra crossings. Road crash deaths in India are mostly treated as data points, and there are few questions in Parliament and legislatures about enforcing the law, beginning with the Motor Vehicles Act, and standards set by the Indian Roads Congress. Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari told Parliament last year that 17% of road accidents involved pedestrians, and 1.77 lakh people died in crashes in 2024. Data collection practices, however, do not always pass muster, and IIT Delhi, which has a specialised transport safety research centre, reports that the actual share of pedestrians in crash incidents is estimated to be about 35%. City administrators talk about pedestrian safety with great piety at public forums but have no system to ensure that every footpath meets IRC standards of a clear width of 1.8 metres to allow two wheelchairs to pass side by side and contain no obstructions. Ironically, some activists oppose full adoption of these norms, as they could get in the way of hawkers pursuing a livelihood. Unloved pedestrians are thus sandwiched between cars and hawkers.

As the Kerala incident makes clear, motorised claimants to all public spaces are on the rise, with an adversarial and often hostile relationship with walkers. City governments are busy accommodating more vehicles by slashing footpaths to ribbons; there were over 36 crore vehicles in the country in 2023, and 2.4 crore were sold in 2024-25. Pedestrians may be consumers too and have Supreme Court-mandated rights, but they face unfair competition. They are seen as a net cost, diffuse and unorganised, while cars, two-wheelers and hawking are treated as economic drivers with agency. Some cities have been placing bollards on footpaths to deter rogue riding by two-wheelers, with mixed results. Other countries have redesigned bollards to enable wheelchair movement while blocking motorbikes. Yet, the elephant in the room is lack of enforcement. Even old-fashioned methods such as policemen recording violations on a camera phone and sending challans linked to vehicle insurance renewals would make citizen enforcement unnecessary. The shameful reality is that Indian road safety wears the hat of benign populism, where deaths are a small price for high economic growth rates. Road rules are not absolute. Pedestrians and vulnerable road users will continue to pay the price.

© Free Press Journal