Inspired by the Supreme Court’s recent judgment on the fundamental right to walk, this article reflects on a freedom so ordinary that India forgot it needed protecting.
A Tuesday morning in India. The city scarcely matters. It could be Panaji, Pune, Patna, or any of the countless urban centres where danger has become an accepted part of walking. A man steps out of his home and begins a short walk to work, school, or a nearby tea stall. There is nothing remarkable about the journey. Yet, to navigate a public road, he must often contend with broken footpaths, encroachments, and fast-moving traffic on infrastructure designed primarily for vehicles. What should be the most ordinary exercise of personal mobility has become an unnecessary risk. This is daily life for 1.4 billion people whose feet touch Indian roads.
The numbers do not whisper; they detonate. India recorded 1,80,530 road accident deaths in 2023 nearly five hundred a day. One in five of the dead was simply walking. Not speeding. Not drunk. Not distracted. Guilty only of believing a road belongs to people, not just machines. Delhi loses a pedestrian every fourteen hours. Mumbai, every eighteen.
‘Let this land’, a 2024 WHO report ranked India among the deadliest countries on earth to be a pedestrian. Fewer than thirty percent of the country’s urban roads have a footpath that is both usable and unobstructed. In the country that turned the simple act of walking into a weapon against an empire, where Gandhi’s marches were built on nothing but footsteps, you cannot, in 2026, walk your child to school without staking their life on it.
It took a five-year-old boy dying. It always does. The story is almost too ordinary, and that ordinariness is the horror. Nine in the morning. A father. His son’s hand in his hand. Walking to school, nothing more dramatic than that. A truck came from behind and tore through the boy. He did not survive. The courts found that the accident occurred in the absence of even the most basic pedestrian infrastructure. In many ways, the facts of the case reflected a larger and longstanding reality: Indian roads have been planned primarily around the movement of vehicles, while pedestrians, despite constituting a significant share of road users, have remained largely invisible in law and policy.
The High Court awarded the father eight lakh rupees. On appeal, that was cut to under five, as though a court had calculated what a dead child and a broken father were worth and arrived at something just short of that. The Supreme Court found that calculus unacceptable and restored the original award. But it refused to stop there. For the first time in seventy-five years of constitutional history, a bench asked plainly: why does the right to walk (older than every wheel ever laid on Indian soil) exist nowhere in law as something the State is actually obliged to protect?
The Division Bench of the Hon’ble Supreme Court did not merely argue; they declared. Walking on a proper footpath is not a lesser right that vehicles get to override. It comes first. Cars, bikes, and buses come after. The Constitution guarantees every citizen the freedom of movement, but for decades that guarantee was administered as though movement meant driving. Road budgets reflected it. City plans reflected it. The person on foot was left to negotiate whatever space the machines had not yet claimed.
The judgment does not merely recognise a gap; it names one. For all the constitutional richness of Articles 19 and 21, the right to walk has never found expression in a dedicated statute. The right to education did. The right to food did. The right to information did. Each of those legislative instruments identifies a duty-bearer, creates an enforcement mechanism, and gives the ordinary citizen somewhere to go when the State fails. The pedestrian has had none of that. Walking was folded, without much thought, into the edges of a Motor Vehicles Act written for an altogether different purpose.
The Bench’s observation that “we have started walking long before wheels were put on our path” is deceptively plain. Behind it lies a quiet reproach: that a country capable of legislating the right to mid-day meals somehow never got around to protecting the pavement. The Netherlands did, decades ago. Britain places a statutory duty on highway authorities to maintain safe footpaths. India, with more pedestrians than almost any nation on earth, arrived at that threshold only on June 19, 2026.
What the Court has done is fill a legislative vacuum that Parliament left undisturbed for seventy-five years. But the more striking aspect of the judgment is not the declaration; it is the architecture that follows it. The Court did not simply announce a right and leave its enforcement to chance. It sketched the contours of a dedicated pedestrian-rights regulator, one insulated from the ministry, with institutional memory, technical expertise, and continuity across governments. The phrase the Bench uses is
“
“perpetual seal and succession” language borrowed from company law, deployed here to make a constitutional point: that rights without durable institutions behind them tend not to survive the tenure of the judges who declared them.
India has demonstrated it can build regulators of that kind. SEBI oversees capital markets with precisely that combination of independence and permanence. TRAI does the same for telecommunications. The question the judgment leaves hanging, directed squarely at the executive, is why three hundred million people who walk India’s roads every day have never been thought to deserve the same.?
One procedural detail deserves attention. Mid-judgment, the Court converted the matter from a compensation appeal into a writ petition under Article 32, renamed Re: Fundamental Right to Walk and Footpath. That is not housekeeping. It is a structural choice, ensuring the matter remains live before the Court, with the Union of India as a party and a senior law officer in attendance. The declaration does not dissolve into the gazette. It stays on the board.
What remains now is execution. The right has been named. The duty-bearer has been identified. The institutional form has been prescribed. A road that accommodates only vehicles is not, in any meaningful sense, a public road; it is infrastructure with a private constituency. To build it that way, and to have built it that way for seventy-five years, is not an oversight of planning. It is a choice, and the Court has finally said so.
June 19, 2026 did not create the right to walk. That right is as old as the species. What the day created was accountability for denying it. Whether India meets that accountability with the seriousness it deserves is, as it has always been, a question not for the courts but for the country. Perhaps the only language left, when law has finally spoken and the street still waits, is this.
*Sudhir Mishra, Founder and Managing Partner, Trust Legal
**Ananya Khare, The Intern, Trust Legal Student, Lloyd Law College