Supreme Court on walking: India is a nation of walkers - but its cities forgot them - BBC News

India's top court has put the spotlight on unsafe footpaths and the country's forgotten pedestrians.

Image source, AFP via Getty ImagesImage caption, Around 45 million people walk to work every day, according to census-based estimates

India correspondentPublished6 August 2026For much of my life, walking in Indian cities has felt less like exercising a right than negotiating an obstacle course.

I grew up in Kolkata, where wide pavements disappeared beneath rows of hawkers. I moved to Delhi, where roads seemed designed almost exclusively for cars. Now I live in Gurugram, where footpaths vanish into rubble and garbage, are abruptly blocked by parked vehicles or construction, or sit uncomfortably high above the road.

So when India's Supreme Court declared in June that the right to walk safely on designated footpaths was a fundamental right, external, it felt less like judicial activism than common sense arriving decades late.

Walking is the most democratic form of transport. Yet it is also the one India's cities have neglected most consistently.