Mid-Day Opinion: Execution deficit biggest hurdle on road to walkable footpaths

Bikers venture onto the pavement along Dattapada Road in Borivli East. FILE PIC/SATEJ SHINDE

The Supreme Court's recent "Right to Walk" judgment feels like a landmark victory for the everyday commuter. However, as a person running a pedestrian advocacy non-profit, I view this milestone with measured scepticism born of years of experience, not cynicism.

Take Mumbai as a case study. The city has boasted a "Pedestrian First Policy" since 2014 and a "Universal Footpath Policy" since 2023. Nationally, meticulous Indian Roads Congress guidelines - updated in 2012 and 2022 - explicitly prescribe what walkable infrastructure should look like, down to footpath widths along with hawker and parking integration. High Courts have even ruled these guidelines mandatory. Yet, walking conditions on our streets have not improved.

The bottleneck isn't a lack of policy; it is a profound deficit of execution. Our urban local bodies are staffed primarily by civil engineers who excel at road construction but lack the specialised expertise needed to design streets for complex urban environments. We cannot expect them to intuitively understand urban design.

Today, advocacy groups waste critical momentum trying to convince municipal officials and traffic police that widening a footpath to maintain a consistent carriageway will not choke vehicular traffic, even when official guidelines support us. Concurrently, traffic signals are frequently timed to give pedestrians a mere 10 seconds - or less - to cross some of our widest roads just to minimise vehicular wait times. This puts even able-bodied pedestrians at risk, let alone senior citizens or persons with disabilities.

Beyond bureaucracy lies a deeper cultural inertia. Walkability is rarely an election issue, and our political class frequently lacks the imagination to prioritise people over automobiles. I have attended public grievance meetings where lawmakers instructed officials to demolish footpaths for on-street parking, claiming "people aren't using them anyway." They miss the point: citizens avoid footpaths because they are narrow, obstructed, and unsafe. Officials also face fierce resistance from shopkeepers defending their "right" to front-row parking, overlooking evidence that walkable streets actually increase local business revenues.

A judicial decree from New Delhi cannot, by itself, rewrite the concrete realities of our neighbourhoods. Turning the "Right to Walk" into reality requires a seismic institutional and societal shift. A new law alone cannot instantly change entrenched municipal, political, or societal mindsets.

This begins by staffing municipal bodies with urban designers and transport planners who can drive systemic change throughout the road construction lifecycle, from planning and design to tendering, execution, and maintenance. Likewise, traffic management should be led by qualified transport planners who look at holistic movement of people rather than the traffic police, whose primary objective is to keep vehicular traffic moving smoothly.

We also need citizens to educate themselves about what makes streets truly walkable, understand the standards they should expect, and demand better from their local corporators and MLAs. Finally, we need political leadership that learns from global cities successfully prioritising walking and has the conviction to bring those lessons home. That requires a willingness to absorb the short-term friction that comes with challenging the automobile-first status quo.

Until we treat our streets as life-giving public arteries rather than mere conduits for vehicles, the right to walk will remain a luxury on paper and a hazard in reality.

Vedant Mhatre is the project director of the Walking Project