India’s cities have spent decades mastering the movement of vehicles while systematically neglecting the people who move without them. Flyovers rise, metros expand, expressways multiply and intersections are redesigned for traffic throughput, yet the most fundamental urban infrastructure—a safe, continuous and accessible place to walk—often disappears beneath parked vehicles, vendors, utility poles, broken paving and construction debris. The paradox is staggering: India invests thousands of crores in sophisticated mobility systems while sometimes failing to ensure that passengers can safely walk the final few hundred metres to them. The pedestrian is therefore not merely the forgotten user of the Indian city; increasingly, the pedestrian is the ultimate test of whether the city itself works.

The Supreme Court’s June 2026 judgment in Maniyar Iliyaz v. P. Ayyappan, recognising safe and demarcated walking space as integral to the fundamental right of movement under Articles 19 and 21, potentially changes the constitutional grammar of urban planning. The principle is deceptively simple but institutionally profound: the right to move on foot precedes the right to move on wheels. A footpath is consequently not leftover road space, decorative landscaping or municipal charity; it is part of the infrastructure necessary to exercise a fundamental right. This reframes pedestrian safety from a discretionary planning preference into a governance responsibility and challenges the deeply embedded hierarchy in which motorised mobility receives priority while pedestrians inherit whatever space remains.

The contradiction becomes most visible around mass-transit investments. A metro station may embody enormous public expenditure, but if the surrounding network lacks continuous footpaths, safe crossings, lighting, shade, drainage and universal accessibility, the last mile becomes the weakest link in the entire transportation chain. India effectively builds an expensive railway to deliver citizens to an unsafe street. Every major transit project should therefore be evaluated as a complete mobility ecosystem rather than merely as a railway or station project. A funded, measurable and enforceable last-mile plan should be mandatory, covering a meaningful pedestrian catchment around every station, with clearly assigned institutional responsibility. Accessibility cannot end at the station gate.

The problem, however, cannot be reduced to “encroachment”. That diagnosis is convenient because it shifts responsibility towards vendors, parked vehicles and citizens while concealing failures of design, maintenance and inter-agency coordination. A footpath interrupted every few metres by utility poles is technically present but functionally absent. A pathway without lighting excludes women after dark; a broken surface excludes elderly citizens and persons with disabilities; a crossing without a pedestrian phase converts the final hundred metres of a journey into a daily gamble. Urban street assessments, including those undertaken in Nagpur, demonstrate the magnitude of the problem, with thousands of physical obstructions disrupting pedestrian movement. The lesson is unmistakable: infrastructure is meaningful only when it remains continuously usable.

India must consequently stop treating pedestrian infrastructure as beautification and start treating it as core economic infrastructure. The economics are compelling. Metro construction may cost hundreds of crores per kilometre, while relatively modest investments around stations can dramatically improve accessibility, safety and ridership. The issue is therefore not whether India can afford pedestrian infrastructure; it is whether India can afford to leave billion-rupee transport investments functionally incomplete. Every metropolitan transport authority should establish a dedicated last-mile mobility cell with authority extending beyond the station boundary. Municipalities require professional curb and parking management, while GIS-based coordination should integrate utilities, road agencies, transport authorities and contractors. Continuous utility corridors and geo-tagged infrastructure can finally end the destructive cycle of digging, repairing and digging again.

Design must also become an enforceable language rather than a consultant’s recommendation. Streets require clearly defined pedestrian, utility, cycling, parking and vehicular zones, with minimum standards based on land use and pedestrian volumes. Physical design can itself become “designed enforcement”: bollards, pedestrian islands, raised crossings, protected edges, tactile paving, appropriate signals and clearly marked corridors reduce dependence on constant policing. Parking presents perhaps the clearest test of political courage. Indian cities often behave as though parking is a right while walking space is negotiable. That logic must be reversed. On-street parking should be priced appropriately, short-duration curb use regulated, digital permits enforced and illegal occupation penalised meaningfully. Building more parking without managing demand merely encourages more private vehicles. Bengaluru’s enormous and continuously expanding vehicle population illustrates the mathematical impossibility of solving congestion simply by adding asphalt.

The pedestrian–vendor conflict requires equal sophistication. Eviction cannot be the permanent urban policy. Street vendors provide livelihoods, affordable services and the informal surveillance that Jane Jacobs associated with vibrant and safer streets. But inclusion cannot mean permitting commercial activity to consume the public right of way. Transparent licensing, designated vending zones, standardised stalls, rational fees and protected pedestrian corridors can reconcile livelihood with mobility. Similarly, safer-street initiatives demonstrate that meaningful transformation need not always await gigantic capital projects. Tactical junction redesign, traffic calming, improved crossings and reclamation of public space can generate immediate benefits. The strategic challenge is to move from isolated islands of excellence to continuous citywide pedestrian networks, where safety does not disappear at the next intersection.

The deeper transformation is cultural, constitutional and administrative. A pedestrian-first city is not an anti-car city; it is a city where mobility is determined by human dignity rather than vehicle ownership. Children should be able to walk to school, elderly citizens cross roads without fear, women travel after sunset with confidence, persons with disabilities navigate independently and workers reach metro stations without negotiating with moving traffic. The Supreme Court has supplied the constitutional principle; engineering can supply the design; technology can coordinate the agencies; funding can enable execution; and enforcement can preserve the outcome. What remains is political and administrative will. India’s urban future should therefore be judged not by how rapidly a car crosses an intersection, but by whether an ordinary citizen can cross it safely, independently and with dignity. The next great mobility revolution may not begin with another flyover. It may begin with a footpath wide enough to remind the city who it was actually built for.

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