Walking as a Right, Not Courtesy: India’s Constitutional Road Hierarchy

Introduction

A father on a peaceful walk could never have imagined that it would be his last one with his son. As the father and son were heading in the direction of the school, a tanker rammed into the boy from behind and crushed him to death. It is not only an excruciating accident but also a consequence of the absence of a footpath, pedestrian crossing, and a road designed primarily for motor vehicles. The Supreme Court, in Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz vs. P. Ayyappan, on June 19, 2026, declared the right to walk on designated footpaths as a fundamental right integral to the right to freedom of movement under Article 19(1)(d). This blog argues not only about the importance of this judgmentbut also about the challenges and obstacles in governance that have kept pedestrians subordinate to motor vehicles for decades.

Circulation Above Citizens: The governance Logic That Forgot the Walker

Licensing, insurance, and regulation of vehicle movement are some of the main purposes of the Motor Vehicles Act 1988.This statute is organized around vehicles and mentions nothing about pedestrians, a choice, not an oversight. Pedestrianism is a pre-established administrative assumption that a road’s primary purpose is the flow of traffic and that anything and everything that impedes this flow, whether a person, vendor, protest, or anything else, poses a problem that needs to be managed.

Till the administration sees the footpath as the space left over after the construction of the road, there will be persistence of broken footpaths, encroachments, absent ramps, and no pedestrian crossings. This isn’t a maintenance failure; rather, it reflects a hierarchy of priorities. According to Sarkar’s service level framework, transportation planners classify pedestrian environments into six categories, from Level A (safe, accessible, user-friendly) to Level F (no separate path, direct vehicular conflict), and no doubt, much of urban India operates at Level D or even worse.

Until now, this logic has been endorsed by the judiciary as well; courts have historically upheld that the main purpose of the road is the flow of vehicular traffic, and pedestrians were always categorized as secondary. Anything that hinders this flow has been seen as a major problem. Such was the legal and administrative environment into which the Supreme Court’s judgment has arrived.

From Civic Courtesy to Constitutional Entitlement

The Supreme Court in Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz vs. P. Ayyappan on 19 June 2026 ruled the right to walk and access to a demarcated footpath as a fundamental right under Part III of the Constitution. This right is essential to the freedom of movement protected under Article 19(1)(d), read with Article 19(1)(a), Article 19(1)(b), Article 19(1)(c), and Article 21 of the Constitution of India. For the first time the Supreme Court prioritized pedestrians over motorized vehicles.

Additionally, the Court also recognized a corresponding obligation for the fundamental right to walk on demarcated footpaths. It ensures that if the road exists, there is a duty to guarantee that there are demarcated and properly maintained footpaths for walkers. The citizens also have the right to invoke constitutional and legal remedies against duty bearers for restitution and compensation independently of the Motor Vehicles Act. This is a significant procedural step because it converts a concluded appeal into ongoing constitutional monitoring.

The right to livelihood under Article 21 has already been recognized in Olga Tellis vs. Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1985; Maniyar Iliyaz extends this right to pedestrian safety and dignity. There is much more to this constitutional interpretation than meets the eye; the multi-article reading has interpretations that go well beyond the freedom of movement alone.

More than the Right to Move: Walking as Speech, Assembly, and Dignity

Article 19(1)(d) of the Indian Constitution established the right to move freely across the nation as a fundamental right. If read in isolation, this forms the core basis of the judgment, and it helps allow the citizens to walk freely without any hindrance. Though nothing is said about the state’s responsibility to create safe walking conditions.

Safety dimensions and features can be derived from Article 21, as this article states the right to life as a fundamental right. It is the duty of the administration toward the citizens to prevent any life-threatening danger. People cannot walk beside the road under the fear and at the mercy of the vehicular traffic, as it exposes them to lethal risk. The right to life, read purposively, requires the government to create a safe environment for the people to exercise their rights. Failure of the government to build proper footpaths leads to several deaths, as the absence of footpaths kills people, and according to Benin’s study, the roads’ environmental characteristics are independent predictors of pedestrian deaths.

Walking is not merely a utilitarian activity; it is how people participate in day-to-day life, and Article 19(1)(a), (b), and (c) show the right path to help citizens enjoy their rights unhindered. One walks to attend a meeting, go to school, visit a place of worship, or go to a funeral. But if the footpath through which a person would have reached the spaces where civic life occurs is absent or not well maintained, it impairs their right. Walking is not merely traveling from one place to another but is an active form of civic participation, which was acknowledged by the Court itself, which used the example of Nagar Sankirtan as the archetype of a constitutionally guaranteed right, which that entirely depends on open access to the public roads.

The reading of multiple articles precludes minimalistic adherence; infrastructure needs to be secure, respectful, and civically open. The real difficulty lies in whether Indian roads can meet such criteria.

The Gap Between the Gavel and the Ground

A constitutional right is effective only as long as the administrative machinery actively enforces it. The fundamental right to walk on a demarcated footpath cannot be fulfilled until the government takes swift and effective measures to eradicate the gap between the judgment and its implementation. The rights of a citizen go directly into a pothole if the judgment isn’t followed by strict administrative measures. The government needs to address the following gaps with utmost efficacy.

The Infrastructural Gap: Most footpaths in urban India exist only in name and are in poor condition. Narrow, broken, encroached-upon, and inaccessible, these sidewalks serve no real purpose. According to Sarkar’s scholarly study, transportation researchers classify pedestrian environments by service quality, and the condition of Indian footpaths falls well below international standards for safe pedestrian movements. This judgment was required, and the duty-bearer framework in it is legally sound, but the question is whether the government and development authorities have the budget, technical capacity, and political incentive to properly exercise this right.

The Disability Gap: According to this judgment, the footpaths should have been accessible to persons with disabilities. But accessibility isn’t just a tag; it requires ramps, tactile paving, adequate wheelchair widths, drop kerbs at crossings, an obstacle-free surface, and many other specifications. Urban Indian footpaths were not made keeping designed with these features in mind for specially abled bodies. The judgment's multi-environmental broad mandate should be treated as a proactive universal design, not merely as otherwise inaccessible infrastructure.

The Legislative Gap: Every other fundamental right is governed by a dedicated statute: the right to education, the National Food Security Act, and the Right to Information Act. These statutes make these rights effectively enforced through creating accountability mechanisms and establishing regulators. The right to walk currently has none of this. The Court directed the Law Commission to examine a statutory framework, and this process deserves serious attention. What bridges this gap is not another judgment but legislation, a legislative framework that identifies the duty-bearers, establishes enforceable standards, and places the redress mechanism in the hands of every citizen who walks the streets.

Following the Desire Line

The child who walked with his father to the school could have returned if the road had had a properly demarcated footpath. And instead of waiting for another tragic accident like this, the constitutional declaration should come into actual existence. The Court, in its judgment, broke the ruinous ideology that had been governing the streets of India for decades. This judgment is a significant victory as it asserted pedestrian primacy as a constitutional matter.

The judgment acts as a desire line, worn into constitutional law by the people who walked unprotected on dangerous roads. The pedestrians are being placed before the vehicular traffic for the very first time; what remains is the harder work of building a footpath that a child can safely walk to school.