Why is walking in our cities so difficult?

India is a country of walkers. A 2019 survey found that Indians made 63% of all journeys on foot, and other estimates suggest that about 45 million people walk to work across the country. These are enormous numbers, and the people behind them face daily hardship. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the right to walk counts as a fundamental right, and while commentators called the ruling a breakthrough, the finding is simply rational and overdue.

Walkability in India suffers because city governments prioritise motor vehicles in allocating public space, and in most places, roads remain the only infrastructure anyone builds or maintains. Footpaths and pavements exist to protect pedestrians and separate them from traffic, and a city needs to plan them with the same care it plans roads: consistent, smooth, and free of obstacles.

Indian pavements rarely meet that standard. Encroachment eats into them, hawkers claim them as selling spots, and repair crews dig them up for work below ground. What survives often runs in disconnected fragments rather than a continuous path. As a result, pedestrians and motorists end up competing for the same stretch of road, and India’s civic norms tend to favour the motorist in that contest.

India also records more road accidents than almost any other country in the world. Road crashes killed 32,825 pedestrians in 2022.

Safety forms a second, less understood barrier to walkability. In neighbourhoods lined with high compound walls and empty streets, even a well-paved pavement can feel unsafe to walk. Pedestrians in these areas must cross long stretches of darkness and isolation to get anywhere on foot.

Poor design compounds the problem, as planners scatter barriers along a pedestrian’s path. Safe surface-level crossings, in particular, are rare. Most major junctions force pedestrians up tall footbridges or down into underground crossings instead of letting them cross at street level.

None of these problems admits an easy fix, but one pattern holds across cities worldwide: the wider a city’s pavements and footpaths run, the better that city’s quality of life and prosperity tend to be.

Pedestrians need real political weight to win wider space, which means municipal officials need more authority to act and elected representatives need a reason to respond to pedestrian demand. Coordinating pedestrians to demonstrate that demand is not easy either, since no single voice speaks for millions of individual walkers. Anyone who has walked an Indian city can attest to the need regardless, and now the Supreme Court has said so too.