India is a nation of walkers - but its cities forgot them

For much of my life, walking in Indian cities has felt less like exercising a right than negotiating an obstacle course.

I grew up in Kolkata, where wide pavements disappeared beneath rows of hawkers. I moved to Delhi, where roads seemed designed almost exclusively for cars. Now I live in Gurugram, where footpaths vanish into rubble and garbage, are abruptly blocked by parked vehicles or construction, or sit uncomfortably high above the road.

So when India's Supreme Court declared in June that the right to walk safely on designated footpaths was a fundamental right, external, it felt less like judicial activism than common sense arriving decades late.

Walking is the most democratic form of transport. Yet it is also the one India's cities have neglected most consistently.

It's remarkable because India remains, above all, a nation of walkers. Around 45 million people walk to work every day, according to census-based estimates, compared with only about 5.4 million who commute in private cars, jeeps or vans.

Nearly a third of urban workers walk to work, while virtually every bus or metro journey begins and ends on foot. Add school runs, shopping trips and other everyday journeys, and walking dominates urban mobility. A 2019 survey of selected cities found that 63% of all journeys were made on foot, making pedestrians the single largest group of road users.

Many are what researchers call "captive pedestrians" - people who walk not by choice but because they cannot afford another option. Women are especially dependent on walking. Yet the people who contribute least to congestion and pollution often face the greatest risks.

The evidence is harrowing. Even where pavements exist, they are often broken, narrow or inaccessible to older people, children and those with disabilities.

They are also blocked by motorcycles, swallowed by parked cars, encroachments or excavated for utility works. Faded zebra crossings are treated as little more than road markings no-one respects. Flyovers speed traffic while forcing pedestrians into hazardous detours below.

A landmark 2011 study of six Indian cities found that India's streets routinely fail pedestrians because of "poor and unsafe" infrastructure.

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

As Geetam Tiwari, a transport scholar at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi puts it, pedestrians have been "pushed to the margins of the road networks" forcing them to "jostle for space with motor vehicles".

The price is paid in lives.

Officially pedestrians account for roughly a fifth of road deaths, external, but independent studies cited by Tiwari estimate the share is closer to 30-40%.

Pedestrians are also the second-largest group of road accident victims after two-wheeler riders. In Delhi and Mumbai, 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.

The Supreme Court case arose 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. 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.

The 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.

Through city walks and public talks, his advocacy group, Walking Project, encourages residents to notice what they have stopped seeing: broken pavements, blocked crossings and unsafe junctions - and compare them with the standards pedestrians are entitled to expect. "When people become apathetic, they stop observing the street," he says.

In a city where an estimated 15 million walking trips are made every day, Aggarwal argues, it is not just footpaths that have disappeared from view, but also the millions of people who depend on them.

For Rahul Goel, a transportation researcher at Delhi's Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the problem begins with governance.

"Are footpaths maintained and cleaned? Does the city ensure they aren't encroached upon?" he says. "In Delhi, many roads do have footpaths, but they're often unusable because of poor governance."

Poor design makes matters worse. Cars parked perpendicular to the kerb often conceal footpaths or block them altogether, while vehicles parked directly on pavements are a common sight.

Footpaths are often too narrow for the number of pedestrians. Many are so high above the road that older people, wheelchair users and others with limited mobility struggle to use them. Others end abruptly, forcing people back onto the carriageway.

"If the footpath is discontinuous, it's simply more convenient to keep walking on the road," says Goel.

He believes the deeper problem is one of priorities. "Urban transport governance is still centred on moving vehicles. Reducing congestion and maximising road space for motor traffic take precedence over pedestrians," he says.

Civic agencies are often reluctant to widen footpaths because they view carriageway space as sacrosanct. That mindset, Goel argues, is reinforced by public pressure.

Traffic jams dominate headlines and social media, pushing authorities to keep vehicles moving. In Delhi, many mid-block crossings have been replaced by U-turns to reduce stoppages, forcing pedestrians onto foot overbridges.

"People don't just need to walk along a road," says Goel. "They need to be able to cross it safely too."

The result is a stark urban inequality.

In Gurugram, a high-speed arterial road cuts through busy neighbourhoods with few safe crossings. Domestic workers, labourers and other pedestrians routinely dodge speeding traffic, and many are killed trying to cross.

Only after the death toll mounted did authorities begin building footbridges.

Across India's cities, those who cannot afford cars or motorcycles are left to risk their lives on roads that barely accommodate pedestrians.

Those who can drive claim an ever-larger share of public space, while walking becomes a leisure activity confined to gated communities, parks or gym treadmills. In a country grappling with rising obesity and lifestyle diseases, cities have turned the most basic form of exercise into something not just inconvenient, but too often dangerous.

Clearly, making people walk will require far more than a court order.

"Walking as a fundamental right should lead to pedestrian-friendly cities, not just pedestrian-friendly streets," says Tiwari.

That means rethinking how cities are designed. Some countries have adopted default urban speed limits of 30km/h or 20mph to protect pedestrians, regardless of the type of road. Achieving that, Tiwari says, requires redesigning streets by narrowing traffic lanes, altering road surfaces and introducing other traffic-calming measures.

The judges also reflected on walking as something far greater than a way of getting from one place to another. It can be "necessity for the poor, meditation for some, an act of resistance for others and a path to discovery. Walking, they noted, also helped shape India's freedom struggle".

As writer Sumana Roy notes, external, India's political history has often unfolded on foot -from Gandhi's "salt march" to Dandi to Subhas Chandra Bose's "Delhi Chalo" (March to Delhi) and the many protest marches that followed.

For Tiwari, that broader understanding of walking should also shape how cities are built. "Walking is more than a travel option," she says.

"Therefore a safe walking infrastructure requires more than creating footpaths and safe crossing. Walking spaces have to integrate activities like spaces of street vendors, shaded paths, areas for resting for old people and sometimes space where children can play."

For decades, Indian cities have asked how to move more vehicles. The top court has reminded them to ask a simpler one: how do people walk?

I'd settle for something wonderfully unremarkable: a footpath that simply carries me from one end of the street to the other.