DraftCraft Wins Historic Right To Walk Judgement
By Gajanan Khergamker
On June 19, 2026, a bench of the Supreme Court of India comprising Justices P S Narasimha and A S Chandurkar delivered a ruling that DraftCraft International had been working toward, for over 18 years, since before most of the institutions now celebrating the verdict had given the issue a second thought. The right to walk on a demarcated footpath is a fundamental right, the Supreme Court ruled.
This right forms part of the right to movement guaranteed under Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution and is additionally protected under Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty. A citizen's fundamental right to walk on a demarcated footpath is primary and shall have priority over movement by motorised vehicles. The violation of this right entitles citizens to invoke constitutional and legal remedies against duty bearers for restitution and compensation.
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| Mumbai's Gateway of India has been symbolic of DraftCraft's Right To Walk Campaign and despite the years gone by, things have only worsened (Photo: The Draft) |
The judgement arrived from a motor accident compensation case: a father who lost his five-year-old son while taking him to school, a child killed on a road that should have had a footpath and did not, a family whose grief the court converted into a constitutional declaration that will now govern the relationship between every Indian pedestrian and every authority responsible for the pavements on which they walk.
The family's loss became the country's gain. The child who died did not walk on a footpath because there was no footpath to walk on. The court has made the absence of that footpath a constitutional violation. Now, the authority responsible for its absence is a duty bearer and the remedy is legally enforceable. That is what justice looks like when it arrives from the institution designed to deliver it.
The Public Space Project, DraftCraft International's flagship initiative, was established with a mandate that this ruling has now enshrined in the Constitution's fundamental rights architecture. The project describes itself as a DraftCraft International initiative examining and advocating for inclusive laws and policies for access, movement and transport in public spaces.
Its research sections cover the BEST Bus Service, environment, pedestrian rights and road safety. Its pilot endeavours have included The Right To Walk Campaign, The Gateway of India Project and The Elephanta Island Project - three specific urban public space investigations whose combined findings built the evidentiary and argumentative foundation for exactly the legal position the Supreme Court has today affirmed.
The project documented what every pedestrian in Mumbai already knew and what no regulatory authority had been required to treat as a constitutional matter: that the footpath is a constitutional infrastructure, that its absence is a constitutional violation, and that the legal system already possessed the tools to enforce this position if the right case reached the right bench with the right framing.
The Public Space Project's research on speedbreakers, barricades, broken footpaths and inadequate pedestrian space documented the specific harms produced by broken footpaths, uneven paver blocks and insufficient walking space in India's urban centres, establishing the systematic nature of a failure that individual complaints to municipal corporations had proved incapable of remedying.
The research did not treat these as aesthetic failures or planning inconveniences. It treated them as rights violations, a framing whose legal validity the Supreme Court has today confirmed in terms that leave no interpretive gap for municipal authorities to exploit.
The writer's article for the Public Space Project on illegal speed breakers, installed at the whim of vociferous residents enjoying the patronage of local political leaders while giving the law a miss, documented the specific pattern by which India's road infrastructure is shaped not by legal standard or engineering requirement but by the political economy of local influence.
Speed breakers installed illegally do not merely slow vehicles. They displace pedestrians, damage footpaths, create drainage obstructions, and contribute to the general condition of road infrastructure whose primary victims are the people on foot. The present-day Supreme Court ruling underlines the public's right to walk and with safety: not navigate through dangerously-placed barricades and illegally-constructed speedbreakers.
The project's documentation of this specific failure illuminates the broader argument - that the pedestrian's relationship with India's public roads has been governed not by law, not by right, and not by any principle of constitutional priority, but by the accumulated effect of a thousand administrative decisions made without reference to the person walking.
The Gateway of India Project specifically investigated the waterfront precinct of P.J. Ramchandani Marg and the area surrounding the Gateway monument, one of the most photographed stretches of public road in India, whose footpath condition the project documented with systematic precision.
The hawkers whose numbers the project recorded growing far beyond any licensed count, the tourist coaches occupying pedestrian space with engines running and drivers indifferent to the obstruction they created, the general privatisation of a public promenade through the unchallenged accumulation of commercial encroachment. These were documented not as colour for a travel piece but as evidence for a legal argument. The argument was that the pedestrian who owns this space constitutionally had been progressively displaced from it, and that the displacement was not a planning oversight but a rights violation whose remedy resided in the courts.
Every one of those encroachments is, as of today, a constitutional violation. Every hawker occupying a footpath without authorisation is now obstructing a fundamental right. Every parked vehicle on a designated pedestrian way is now infringing a constitutional guarantee that the Supreme Court has declared primary over motorised movement. Every municipal corporation that has allowed encroachments to persist and compound is now a duty bearer whose failure to act is legally actionable by the citizen whose right to walk has been denied.
The duty to demarcate, construct, maintain and safeguard footpaths and other pedestrian infrastructure rests with urban development authorities, municipal corporations, municipalities and panchayats.
The court has named the right, identified the duty bearers and the remedy. What it has not named, because it could not, because the cases are too numerous to enumerate and the geography too vast to specify, is every specific footpath in every specific city whose present condition constitutes a violation of the fundamental right declared today.
That identification is the work that The Right To Walk Campaign, The Public Space Project and initiatives like it must now accelerate, because today's ruling has created the legal instrument that field documentation of footpath conditions can be used to deploy. A project that has spent years documenting broken paver blocks, encroached walkways, elderly-unfriendly road designs and illegally installed speed breakers now operates in a legal environment in which that documentation is not merely advocacy material.
The investigation into illegal speedbreakers, pivotal to the Right to Walk, found perhaps its most striking illustration in Mumbai's Colaba, where DraftCraft under the Right To Walk Campaign and the Public Space Project documented an astonishing 39 unauthorised speedbreakers crammed into a stretch of barely 300 metres between Gateway of India and the Radio Club, including Mere Weather Road and adjoining lanes.
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| With the right to walk out of bounds for citizens, it's the differently-abled or infirm, hit the most. Case in point being the bylanes around the Gateway of India with illegal speedbreakers (Photo: The Draft) |
Constructed in blatant disregard of the Indian Roads Congress' engineering standards, these structures differed wildly in height, width and profile, having emerged not from any lawful traffic-calming assessment but from the demands of influential neighbourhood groups whose preferences frequently prevailed over statutory norms. Their remarkable overnight disappearance whenever a high-ranking dignitary visited the vicinity, followed by their equally swift reappearance after the convoy departed, exposed an administrative culture in which the law was suspended for convenience rather than enforced as a matter of constitutional obligation.
The significance of that documentation extends far beyond irregular road engineering. Every illegally constructed speedbreaker that damages vehicles, forces pedestrians off designated walking space, obstructs drainage or creates avoidable hazards represents another instance of public infrastructure being reshaped by private influence instead of legal authority. The Supreme Court's recognition of the pedestrian's right to safe movement now places these practices within a constitutional framework, making it impossible to dismiss them as merely local inconveniences or neighbourhood disputes.
What the Public Space Project recorded in Colaba, within sight of the Gateway of India, was not simply an accumulation of unlawful traffic-calming devices, but a larger pattern of governance in which public roads ceased to be administered according to law and became vulnerable to the dictates of the loudest voices, to the enduring detriment of every citizen exercising the fundamental right to walk.
It is the factual basis for constitutional litigation. The citizen who trips on a broken paver block, or on a badly-constructed speedbreaker and sustains injury on a footpath that a municipal corporation failed to maintain now has a fundamental rights violation to add to the negligence claim the law has always permitted. The elderly person who cannot use a footpath because no accessible design standard was applied has a constitutional guarantee to invoke. The person with a disability who is forced onto the carriageway because the footpath is obstructed by a vehicle or a hawker or a utility pole placed in the middle of the walking surface has a Supreme Court declaration of fundamental rights priority to cite in their complaint.
The court observed that walking often remains invisible to the light. That observation, made from the highest judicial bench in the country, is the Public Space Project's founding premise expressed in constitutional language. The pedestrian has always been invisible to the light - invisible to the road engineer who designs for vehicle throughput, invisible to the municipal councillor who allocates budgets toward projects with visible political returns, invisible to the traffic police officer who manages carriageway flow without reference to the footpath condition beside it, and invisible to the urban planner who measures a city's progress in terms of flyovers built and lane-kilometres added without counting the walking surface lost in the process of adding them.
The Supreme Court has today switched on a constitutional light, making it clear that the pedestrian is no longer invisible in the eyes of the law. By recognising the primacy of the pedestrian's rights, the Court has affirmed that the footpath belongs to those who walk upon it as a matter of constitutional guarantee, not governmental charity.
Approximately 35,000 pedestrians were killed in road accidents in India in 2023, representing nearly one in five of all road fatalities. Pedestrians account for 19.5 per cent of all road deaths according to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.
Each of those deaths has a geography that involves the absence or obstruction of a footpath. Each of those families has an experience that today's ruling has retroactively - and for future cases, prospectively - characterised as the consequence of a constitutional failure by a named category of duty bearer. The numbers are not statistics. They are the scale of a rights crisis whose legal resolution the Supreme Court has today provided and whose practical resolution must now follow from the administrative and legal systems whose performance the court has directed to change.
The Public Space Project and the Right To Walk campaign were established in the understanding that inclusive laws and policies for access, movement and transport in public spaces are not gifts from a generous administration. They are rights whose assertion requires exactly the combination of field documentation, legal argument, media advocacy, and institutional persistence that the project has brought to the pedestrian rights question across its operational life. Today's ruling is the constitutional validation of that understanding. The approach was correct, the argument was sound and the courts have agreed.
For the child's father whose loss produced this ruling, the judgement is a remedy whose completeness no legal declaration can achieve. His son walked toward school on a road that should have had a footpath and died because there was none. The Supreme Court cannot restore what was taken from him. It has done what courts are constituted to do: it has ensured, with the full force of constitutional declaration, that the absence which killed his son is now legally impermissible, that the authority responsible for that absence is legally accountable, and that the next family facing the same situation has a fundamental right and a constitutional remedy where this family had only loss.
For DraftCraft International and The Public Space Project - whose research, advocacy and documentation across its Right To Walk Campaign, Gateway of India Project and Elephanta Island Project have argued, from field evidence and constitutional principle, for exactly this legal position - today is the day the argument became the law of the land.
The walk is complete. The footpath belongs, constitutionally and finally, to the person on foot.
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