चलने का अधिकार: फुटपाथों की सुरक्षा के लिए सिर्फ आदेश नहीं, ठोस कार्य चाहिए

“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1862 essay Walking, a meditation on the act of putting one foot before the other as an expression of freedom itself. Thoreau was writing about the Massachusetts countryside, not the crumbling, encroached, and vehicle-choked footpaths of an Indian metropolis. Yet his instinct that walking is not a residual activity squeezed into the margins of a busier life but a condition of human dignity and liberty has, a century and a half later and half a world away, found an unlikely echo in the marbled halls of the Supreme Court of India.

On June 19, 2026, a two-judge bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar did something unprecedented in the history of motor accident cases. A routine appeal for compensation over the tragic death of a 5-year-old boy hit by a tanker when he was walking on a road that had neither a footpath nor a crossing, nor enough room for him and his father to stop, was before the court, not just as matter of compensation but as a constitutional declaration of great significance.

In Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz & Anr v. P. Ayyappan & Ors (2026), the court of its own volition declared the right to walk on safe, designated footpaths a fundamental right. It observed that the “wheels overtook our imagination”, and the pedestrian, who for centuries was the only user of every road, was now pushed to the margins, treated not as a citizen but as an obstacle.

Despite the huge investments by governments in flyovers and expressways, pedestrian deaths on Indian roads have risen by over 160 per cent in the past decade. Walking, that most universal and most democratic form of human locomotion, is now the most dangerous enterprise a poor citizen can engage in. The brief order (14 pages) has indeed brought Indian constitutional law to the level of the pedestrian. But, however well written a proclamation is, it is not a working intersection.

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It is argued here that while the elevation of the “right to walk” to Article 19(1)(d) and Article 21 represents a paradigm shift towards what can be termed spatial constitutionalism, the judgment will become merely a footnote in history unless it is complemented by statutory funding obligations, an overhaul of municipal legislation, and a careful and humane reconciliation with the rights of the street vendors who occupy the same pavement.

Since 1950, the traveller has been the primary focus of Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution, in the context of restrictions on inter-State travel, inter-State permits, and so on. It was a right designed mostly at the level of the area and the highway and not the block and footpath.

Where freedom of movement starts

What the court has now said is subtler and more radical than it really sounds: freedom of movement starts, literally, at the front door, on two feet, before the car is started. To say that it is not as much an inconvenience for a citizen to not be able to walk as it is to not be able to travel from one State to another is an important distinction; in an important sense, it is even worse to not be able to even walk.

This line of argument leads quite logically, one suspects, to an intersection with the other freedoms grouped in Article 19(1): speech, assembly, and association. A footpath is not just a transit path to the street but the space where hawkers and customers engage in the daily informal economy’s conversation, where children walk to school, where the elderly stroll, where a political rally coalesces before it goes to the street. When a footpath is lost, to encroachment, potholes, or just by not being there, it is not only the safety of the pedestrian that is reduced; the public square itself is diminished. Walking is not just a form of transportation but a way of being citizens.

Article 19(1)(d) provides the civic dimension of the argument; Article 21 provides the moral weight. The court’s reasoning is clear: it is not an administrative error to force a pedestrian onto a street with trucks, buses, and speeding two-wheelers. It is a structural hazard to life, created however unwittingly by a decade or more of policy decisions that made the car “the citizen of the street” and everybody else a trespasser upon it. The failure to provide infrastructure to allow a citizen to walk is a constitutional violation, in the very words of the court, on the part of the public duty-bearer, the municipality, the urban development authority, and the state.

The impact of the ruling, and perhaps most importantly for city planners, is that the fact is its hierarchy. The court said nothing about pedestrians being entitled to be on the road. Its belief was based on the fact that it is not incidental to road planning that pedestrians have access; that the primary constitutional priority lies with pedestrians and not with the ability to park vehicles or to travel at high speed.

This is the opposite of the tacit assumption made by India’s traffic engineers over the past 80 years, in which the footpath (if there is one) is whatever that is left over from the carriageway, median, parking bay, and service lane. The court has essentially instructed these engineers to redraw the segment of the road from the outside to the inside, from pedestrian to car.

One State’s right to declare does not, independent of other circumstances, pour a slab of concrete in another State. To call this constitutional statement self-executing is to trivialise the process of its enactment, and the seriousness of what it is, which is a declaration. Whether Maniyar Iliyaz will change Indian streets or just feature in law reports is a matter of three fault lines.

The financial angle

The first is money. This is not the first constitutional right to be tried that comes with a lot of fanfare and remains unfulfilled. Faced with the thin fiscal structure of the 74th Constitutional Amendment, which gave urban local bodies constitutional status, municipal corporations are compelled to spend upwards of 80 per cent of transport capital budgets on flyovers and road widening, which are visible, and “development” projects that come with ribbon cuttings, photo opportunities, and the prospect of re-election of members. Meanwhile, footpaths, which serve the needs only of those who earn a living by walking, the elderly poor, and schoolchildren and not the car-owning electorate, are underfunded.

If you make it a fundamental right but say nothing about raising money, then here is where it will end up: there will be featured footpaths close to airports and secretariats and cosmetic tiles everywhere else. Putting in place a statutory requirement, say 25 per cent of the municipal road capital budget to be dedicated to the National Pedestrian Rights Act, would turn a constitutional principle into a concrete budget line where constitutional principles actually reside.

Contested ground

The second is the footpath as contested ground. The footpath the court desires to have cleared and continuous is also home to a large informal economy, which is protected on paper by the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, and on the ground by the vendor’s Article 19(1)(g) right to a livelihood.

Article 21 and Article 19(1)(g) are not at each other’s throats, properly read, but it would be folly to believe that. The horror movie of “beautification” and drives for “encroachment removal” are not new to the country. The same right to “unobstructed footpaths” can be used to justify the demolition of other rights. Thus, a clear no-brainer solution is to design multi-tier streetscapes with regulated vending zones along the side and not through an unbroken walking strip, as has already been piloted in some cities, like Ahmedabad and Bhubaneswar, under the 2014 Act.

The third is a more technical but no less important issue, one where the judgment creates an independent cause of action for restitution and civil damages to victims of the failure by municipal governments and panchayats to provide safe pedestrian facilities as well as compensation under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. The old law was not designed for this and saw the pedestrian as a danger to be insured against rather than as a rights-holder to be covered.

Now, however, the question of accountability is an issue; the responsibility moves to the civic authority that did not create the footpath, just as much as it moves to the person who did not see the child on the road. The bigger question is whether the overburdened courts will be able to take on such a volume of claims, but the doctrinal shift is the reality.

The Supreme Court did not stop there. Its order calls on the Law Commission and the relevant Union ministries, Housing and Urban Affairs as well as Road Transport and Highways, to do the difficult task of translating a judgment into policy.

Actions needed

Three actions will make the statement stick. Parliament should enact a National Pedestrian Rights Act, which would make the advisory recommendations of the Indian Roads Congress (the country’s premier technical body for highway engineering and road construction) for pedestrian infrastructure legally enforceable minimum standards, with clear responsibility in case of failure to meet the standards.

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City master plans should prioritise the pedestrian over the car and mandate that all roads have continuous footpaths, safe pedestrian crossings, shade, and tactile paving for the visually impaired. Municipalities should create real, decentralised, ward-level audit and restitution committees to inspect and record encroachments and infrastructure deficiencies, and institute remedies as now established by the court.

Expressways and flyovers are not the only measure of a city’s democratic nature, which is actually measured more honestly by how safe and secure public spaces are for the child who walks to school, the elderly on a morning walk, the disabled, and the low-income commuter who walks to bus stops. For decades most of urban India has failed this simple constitutional test.

The Supreme Court has now called it out. In Maniyar Iliyaz it has laid out the constitutional framework for what can be considered “spatial justice”, which recognises “the right to move” in public spaces as a fundamental right and not a matter of municipal convenience. Now it is up to State legislatures to finance it, urban planners to plan it, and local entities to construct it, brick by brick, kerb by kerb, so that the right to walk does not disappear where the asphalt starts.

Faizan Mustafa is Vice Chancellor, Chanakya National Law University, Patna.

Aashank Dwivedi is a scholar at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar National Law University, Sonepat, Haryana.

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