Expert Explains | Supreme Court called for right to walk: Why this will need more than footpaths

The issue of road safety is a type of “elite capture”, in which the use of public infrastructure by wealthier people is privileged over the needs of others. Pedestrians and cyclists (along with two-wheeler and public transport users) are more likely to be road accident victims than private car users.  They are also likely to be poorer than private car users, and are forced to walk or cycle because they cannot afford any other option.

These social divisions are exacerbated by the lack of safe roads. This absence worsens poorer peoples’ quality of life and prospects, constrains children’s access to school and playtime, and deprives adults of the health and well-being effects of walking in wealthier neighbourhoods.

It is in this context that the right to walk needs to be considered — not just as something to be expected as a part of how roads are built, but rather as a fundamental right guaranteed through the right to “move freely through the territory of India” and the “right to life” under Articles 19(1)(d) and 21 of the Constitution.

But what precisely is the legal import of the right to walk, and how can it have a real effect on the ground? By reading the right to walk into fundamental rights, the court has created a basis for its development. The case at hand had limited scope, but after settling the immediate legal issues, the court asked for it to be relisted as a writ petition. One can expect that the issue of walking will be considered in more specific terms in this subsequent iteration.

For the right to walk to be truly meaningful, people must be at its centre. This requires an enabling institutional framework rather than narrow infrastructure-driven solutions that may be slow to implement. This article considers some of the directions in which the right to walk can be developed, considering its social and cultural ramifications as well as implementation challenges.

Walking is cultural and social, not just about infrastructure

The Supreme Court has pointed out that “walking is not just motion” but embodies expressional, congregational and associational rights under Article 19(1)(a), Article 19(1)(b) and Article 19 (1)(c).

To this, we can add the words of the iconic former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa, who said: “Sidewalks are the relatives of parks and plazas, not of streets.” They are for conversations, socialising, doing business and children playing, as much as they are for individual autonomy and mobility.

The pedestrian “right of way” has to respond to the social and biophysical requirements of the human beings who use it. A pavement imagined as a sterile strip of infrastructure is not necessarily safe or comfortable for its users without shade-giving trees, places for rest, food and water, and “eyes on the street”. The last of these is a concept developed by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who observed that public spaces become safer when more people — residents, shopkeepers, pedestrians, cafe patrons — are around.

When viewed in isolation from its social setting, the right to walk could easily run into conflict with the livelihood rights of hawkers. This, however, is a self-defeating understanding of the ecosystem of walking, which includes cycling, walking, public transport, neighbourhood life and workday commutes. Moreover, to interpret a fundamental right in a way that denies the vulnerabilities and lived realities of people would defeat the purpose of the Constitution.

The right to walk should not come at the cost of making people poorer, or by closing off avenues of everyday commerce, rest and refreshment. Social interactions and the exchange of news and views are all part of the life of pavements.

The presence of vendors and shade-giving trees on the roadside might seem inconvenient from an engineering point of view, but they are necessary accompaniments of our street life. Ideally, they should coexist alongside the pedestrian right of way. This is not an impossible task if it is secured through administrative intervention at the street-level, by shifting vending spots a few paces here and there, working around the trees and planning spaces for rest and shade where they are not available.

The right to walk should not be limited to ‘islands’

Many of the social and cultural issues around walking are in fact taken into account in a clutch of recent design-led projects such as Chandni Chowk and Aurobindo Marg in Delhi, Church Street and Gandhi Bazaar in Bengaluru and CG Road in Ahmedabad. But while these interventions are well-intentioned, they tend to be small and intensive projects with limited geographical impact.

The Supreme Court’s intervention on this issue nudges us in a different direction, to think about how walking as a fundamental right can be made mainstream and local. For this, it should be achievable within available budgets and resources. Perfect design-led solutions may have to be sacrificed for making conditions safer and more comfortable for pedestrians on every kind of street.

This is not to say that pedestrian life does not need an aesthetic imagination, but that form should follow functionality. It is more critical that people get networks of circulation — from home to the bus, work, school, or the market — rather than small islands of perfectly constructed space. Interventions should prioritise the needs of vulnerable groups and focus on places where there are lots of walkers, such as in the areas around schools, bus stands and train stations, labour chowks and low-income neighbourhoods.

Institutional fragmentation around pedestrian rights

There is a legal and institutional vacuum around the issue of walkability. The Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 imposes duties on motorists vis-à-vis pedestrians, but it is primarily a law for motor vehicles and cannot secure the public rights of pedestrians.

There are, separately, a number of engineering designs and standards of road safety that should be applied in road construction projects, but these are not legally enforceable and fall short of a right for pedestrians.

To end this vacuum, the Supreme Court has sought a standalone framework for pedestrians in which municipalities, development authorities and panchayats are responsible for ensuring the right to walk. It has called for a regulatory structure through which the right can be implemented.

It is often assumed that pavements are already the mandate of elected local bodies, but there is quite a lot of difference between states in how this role is understood. The sense of purpose that local authorities have towards pavements seems better in cities that retain a long usage of the street as a place of associational life. Kolkata’s pavements are a case in point — on the whole, they are cleaner and better built, well-lit, provisioned with toilets, hawkers and vendors, and rich in sociality and neighbourhood life.

In cities such as Bhubaneswar and Indore, one can see that walkability has improved in some areas because of recent efforts to improve pavements. These examples encourage us to think about how the right to walk can be integrated into the everyday work of municipalities, in the manner that the Supreme Court might have envisaged.

But in many states, the current relationship of municipalities to pavements is fragmented into a cluster of different tasks — tree pruning, sweeping, drainage, regulating of hawkers — without responsibility for overall outcome.

Municipalities also deal with pavements side-by-side with other agencies: development authorities and public works departments construct many of the city roads, and electricity departments and water boards plant their infrastructure all over it (often blocking the way for walkers). The traffic police are responsible for policing the movement of cars, and municipalities run demarcated parking areas, but sometimes neither considers themselves accountable for cars parked on the pavement.

It would be impractical to unify these diverse functions into one administrative agency. It could, however, be the task of the municipality to to integrate and pull together the various pieces of the puzzle to ensure a safe and comfortable right of way for walkers.

Their role should not, therefore, be limited to the construction of pavements, but to securing the right to walk in a holistic and continuous sense through an enabling framework that sets principles, goals and basic minimum standards of safety and comfort.

The author is a Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi