As part of the Supreme Court’s expansion of Article 21 since the 1970s, it has declared the right to walk on demarcated footpaths a fundamental right. The Bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Atul S. Chandurkar reaffirmed the right in a case seeking higher compensation for a five-year-old boy’s death after being struck and killed by a tanker lorry in Karnataka. As motorised transport has become more widespread, the Bench noted with regret that walking has become an inconvenience, with motorists often treating pedestrians as a ‘nuisance’ to be tolerated or cleared. In the absence of a national law governing pedestrian rights, responsibility for pedestrian safety is split across municipal laws, town-planning statutes, and street design guidelines. As such, pedestrians are considered to be safe if they face no immediate physical harm. Most cities also lack continuous unobstructed footpaths; where footpaths do exist, they are often encroached on by parking, vendors, utilities, and construction debris, and competing pressures such as road widening work.

While a right to walk is desirable, the ideas that pavements belong to pedestrians and that they have right of way should be cultural in order to endure. Rights-based legislation in India that has sought to change public culture has had mixed success. The Street Vendors Act 2014 sought to protect vendors from harassment as under Article 19(1)(g). But in most cities, municipalities still conduct “eviction drives” while implementation has lagged because the Act requires surveys, town vending committees, and the demarcation of vending zones — processes that many urban local bodies have delayed or simply abandoned. Weak implementation has allowed informal rent-seeking by officials to persist in some cases. The new judgment is also likely to set up disputes with the 2014 Act. Second, the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act 2003 curtailed public smoking over 20 years, but not by “restitutionary remedies”, as the Court has suggested for walking, but with consistent social messaging and small, immediate fines. Finally, despite strict laws and ‘Swachh Bharat’ mandates, the culture of littering remains because the law focuses on citizens’ duty to segregate whereas the state has often overlooked its duty to collect segregated waste. Similarly, if the state does not build footpaths, the citizen’s right will be meaningless. The Court’s constitutional nudge may thus lead to no real change if it remains a legal tool for compensation after a tragedy. A state using it to ‘cleanse’ streets of informal commercial activity could also gentrify these public spaces and criminalise the survival of the urban poor. The nudge’s principal path to success will be by moving the state’s funds towards pedestrian infrastructure.