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The Supreme Court, in a judgment on June 19, declared walking a fundamental right. A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and A.S. Chandurkar ruled that using a demarcated footpath is protected under Articles 21 and 19(1)(d) – the right to life and to move freely. The bench added that pedestrian movement takes legal priority over motorised vehicles.

The ruling arrives when India has quietly and systematically built cities around automobiles, not walking. Delhi has roughly 7.5 million registered active vehicles but formal parking infrastructure for fewer than a lakh. Roads have been widened at the expense of footpaths. Flyovers have been built at the cost of pedestrian crossings. The city has been reorganised, decade by decade, to move vehicles – and to leave people who walk at the margins, literally and politically.

Meanwhile, nearly two pedestrians have been killed on Delhi’s roads every day, going by data from the 2024 Delhi Crash Report 2024.

And Delhi is not an exception. The dynamics of elite encroachment, selective enforcement, and the systematic privileging of cars over people are visible, in varying degrees, across Indian cities.

That the Supreme Court has now had to remind the state of its constitutional duty towards pedestrians is not a victory. It is an indictment.

The infrastructure and governance deficit

The deficit of walking infrastructure in the national capital is a critical failure of governance. According to the India Status Report on Road Safety 2024, 44% of Delhi’s roads have no footpaths.

Of the footpaths that do exist, only 26% meet the minimum standards set by Indian Roads Congress, which specifies a pedestrian walkway of at least 1.8 metres width. Across Delhi, effective pedestrian width for the footpaths had fallen below 0.8 metres – less than half the legal minimum.

Elderly residents and schoolchildren are pushed onto the carriageway as a daily routine. For a wheelchair user, there is no usable footpath space at all. The city’s residents pour into this deficit whenever they walk.

A footpath on Satyawati Marg, Delhi, blocked by parked vehicles, reducing the pavement to an overflow car park. Credit: Google Street View

And here is where the public conversation usually goes wrong. The dominant image of encroachment in Delhi, and across the country, is of the rehri-wallah or the thela-wallah – the........

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