India is a nation of walkers – but its cities forgot them
A Fundamental Right to Walk: India's Urban Pedestrian Crisis
Ninoda.com – India's Supreme Court recently affirmed that citizens possess a fundamental right to walk safely on designated footpaths. This June declaration arrived not as radical judicial activism, but as long-overdue common sense for a nation where walking remains the most democratic form of transportation.
Despite being called a nation of walkers, Indian cities have consistently neglected pedestrian infrastructure. The numbers tell a compelling story: approximately 45 million individuals walk to their workplaces daily, according to census-based estimates. By contrast, only about 5.4 million people commute using private cars, jeeps, or vans. Nearly one-third of urban workers choose walking as their primary mode of transport, while virtually every bus or metro journey begins and concludes on foot.
The Hidden Majority of Road Users
A comprehensive 2019 survey across selected Indian cities revealed that 63% of all journeys were completed on foot. This makes pedestrians the single largest group of road users in the country. Many of these individuals are what researchers term "captive pedestrians" — people who walk not by preference, but because they cannot afford alternative transportation options.
Women demonstrate particular dependence on walking. Yet ironically, those who contribute least to congestion and pollution often face the greatest dangers on city streets.
Infrastructure That Fails Its People
The evidence of pedestrian neglect proves harrowing. Even where pavements exist, they frequently suffer from being broken, narrow, or inaccessible to older people, children, and those with disabilities. Motorcycles block pathways, parked cars swallow entire sections, and utility excavations create additional hazards.
Faded zebra crossings receive little respect from drivers. Flyovers accelerate vehicle traffic while forcing pedestrians into dangerous detours below. A landmark 2011 study examining six Indian cities concluded that streets routinely fail pedestrians due to "poor and unsafe" infrastructure conditions.
The Walkability in Indian Cities report by the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities (CAI-Asia) gave the surveyed cities a median walkability score of just 47 out of 100, with the worst conditions around public transport terminals — ironically the places where most journeys begin and end on foot.
Geetam Tiwari, a transport scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, explains that pedestrians have been "pushed to the margins of the road networks" forcing them to "jostle for space with motor vehicles."
The Human Cost of Neglect
The consequences manifest in tragic statistics. Officially, pedestrians account for roughly a fifth of road deaths, but independent studies cited by Tiwari estimate the share reaches closer to 30-40%. Motorcyclists riding on pedestrian footpaths along bridges in Delhi illustrate the daily reality of shared, often contested, space.
Pedestrians represent the second-largest group of road accident victims after two-wheeler riders. In Delhi and Mumbai combined, they account for more than half of all road deaths. According to a World Bank study, crashes already cost India an estimated 3-5% of its GDP each year through lost productivity, healthcare costs, and disability.
A Judicial Turning Point
The Supreme Court case originated from one such tragedy: a five-year-old boy crushed by a truck while walking to school with his father. The judges responded with unusual eloquence regarding this fundamental human activity.
Walking, Justice PS Narasimha wrote, is "the simplest of the simple human activity, inextricably connected to life". Roads therefore impose a corresponding duty on the state to provide safe footpaths. "The fundamental right to walk on demarcated footpaths shall override the privilege of a motorised vehicle," he declared.
This judgment challenges decades of Indian urban planning, where progress has often been measured in kilometres of expressways, flyovers, and elevated corridors. Streets were engineered to move vehicles as quickly as possible, while the one road user every citizen inevitably becomes — the pedestrian — largely disappeared from planners' imagination.
"People know about the latest cars, but walking has become invisible," says Rishi Aggarwal, who has spent more than a decade trying to change that mindset in Mumbai.
From Kolkata's wide pavements swallowed by hawkers to Delhi's car-centric roads and Gurugram's footpaths vanishing into rubble and garbage, the journey toward pedestrian dignity continues. The Supreme Court's ruling offers hope that India's cities may finally remember their walkers.
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