Andhra Pradesh First To Agree Footpath Belongs To The Walker
And, now the bulldozers must follow, says Gajanan Khergamker
The pedestrian has never been the point of Indian urban planning. S/he has been the residual - the person for whom whatever space remains after the road engineer has finished designing the carriageway, the median, the signal-free corridor, and the multi-lane flyover access ramp is designated, with varying degrees of commitment to the designation's maintenance, as the footpath. The footpath is what is left over and the walker is what is left out.
This is not a figure of speech. It is the literal geometry of Indian road design, applied across six decades of urban infrastructure investment whose primary metric has been vehicle throughput and whose pedestrian fatality statistics have been treated as a separate matter, filed under road safety rather than road design, addressed through awareness campaigns rather than engineering accountability, and absorbed into the annual figure of 36,000 dead pedestrians in 2024, one in every five road fatalities in the country, as though the number were a weather event rather than an infrastructure verdict.
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| Municipal failures are not hyper-local grievances or matters of civic grace, they are the direct, tangible violation of a citizen's fundamental Right To Walk |
Andhra Pradesh's notification of the Pedestrian Safety and Universal Accessibility Policy, 2026, is the most consequential state-level response to that verdict that Indian urban governance has produced since the Supreme Court's June 19, 2026, declaration that the Right to Walk on a properly demarcated footpath is a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution. The court's declaration was the necessary legal spark.
The AP policy is the administrative attempt to convert that spark into the tarmac and paver blocks and enforcement machinery that the constitutional declaration requires to mean something at street level, where the walker still negotiates open drains and parked motorcycles and hawker carts and the consequences of a utility agency's decision to dig up a pedestrian corridor three months ago and restore it never.
The distinction between a constitutional declaration and an administrative policy matters because Indian legal history contains constitutional declarations of great force and administrative follow-through of great inadequacy. The Supreme Court declared the right to education a fundamental right in 2002. Children dropped out of schools for years after the declaration because the infrastructure to implement it was assembled slowly, unevenly, and under protest from state governments whose budget priorities did not automatically rearrange themselves in response to a constitutional insertion.
The right to food, affirmed through the National Food Security Act of 2013 after years of Supreme Court directions in the PUCL case, continues to produce malnutrition statistics that the constitutional guarantee cannot reach because the supply chain between the law and the child's meal contains too many points of administrative failure. A fundamental right declared from the bench and a fundamental right enforced on the ground are two different things, and the gap between them is where the 36,000 pedestrians die every year.
Crucially, this structural gap dismantles the comfortable administrative myth that a broken pavement is merely a neighbourhood nuisance. In the post-judgment constitutional landscape, a cratered footpath, a missing curb ramp, an untended trench, or a poorly executed stretch of paver blocks cannot be reduced to a matter of discretionary corporator funds, local ward politics, or the benevolence of a municipal representative.
For decades, the repair of a walking strip has been treated as an ultralocal favour - an item on a local politician’s discretionary ledger to be traded for votes, dispensed during election cycles, or starved of resources when ward interests dictate. That paradigm is now legally dead. These municipal failures are not hyper-local grievances or matters of civic grace; they are the direct, tangible violation of a citizen's fundamental Right To Walk. Every potholed pavement and fractured curb is no longer just bad civic maintenance. It is a daily constitutional breach perpetrated by the state against its citizens across the country.
What makes the Andhra Pradesh policy's architecture more promising than most of the administrative responses that constitutional declarations have historically produced is its specific targeting of the accountability chain at the points where previous frameworks have consistently broken down. The invocation of Section 198A of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, to impose penalties of up to Rs 1 lakh on errant authorities, contractors and design consultants is the provision's most important element, and it is important precisely because it is unusual.
Pedestrian safety enforcement in India has historically targeted the person in motion, the driver who hit the walker, the two-wheeler rider who rode on the footpath, the auto-rickshaw driver who blocked the crossing, rather than the institution whose decision produced the conditions in which the collision was probable. Section 198A, applied to the design consultant who specified a footpath width insufficient for two people to pass without one stepping into the road, or to the contractor who laid paver blocks at an angle that guarantees they will become individual projectiles after the first monsoon, or to the municipal authority that approved a utility agency's trench-digging application without requiring a restoration timeline and bond, shifts the accountability from the incident to the system that produced the incident.
The mandatory two-metre clear walking zone, continuous and obstruction-free across urban, rural, and peri-urban stretches alike, is the policy's operational test. Two metres is not an ambitious specification. It is the minimum required for two pedestrians in a wheelchair or with a pram to pass each other without one moving onto the road. It is the minimum required for a person with a visual impairment using a white cane to navigate without the cane striking an obstacle and providing no warning of the drop into the carriageway beyond.
It is, in Mumbai's Colaba, in Chennai's T. Nagar, in Bengaluru's Koramangala, and in Hyderabad's Banjara Hills, a specification that the current footpath condition fails comprehensively and continuously. The two-metre clear zone is less a design aspiration than a description of what a footpath is. The fact that achieving it requires a government policy with enforcement penalties attached is the most precise measure available of how far Indian urban infrastructure has drifted from what the people who use it are constitutionally entitled to receive. And, the issue is not restricted to a corporator's constituency and symbolic of his or her inability to act in public good. It is larger ... it is the right to walk for anyone, anywhere in India.
DraftCraft International's Public Space Project and Right To Walk Campaign have been making this argument for eighteen years, in Ground Zero reports and through media intervention and legal advocacy; in The Gateway of India Project's systematic recording of footpath encroachments in the heritage precinct; in the Elephanta Island Project's documentation of the relationship between accessible transport infrastructure and public access to heritage; And, in the campaign's specific investigation of 39 illegal speedbreakers in 300 metres between the Gateway of India and the Radio Club in Colaba, structures whose existence, documented with the precision of legal evidence, demonstrated that public road infrastructure in India was being reshaped by private influence rather than legal standard, to the permanent detriment of the pedestrian whose constitutional right to the space was being overridden daily by the demands of the loudest neighbourhood voices and the most influential parking lobbyists.
The Supreme Court's June 19 ruling, and the Andhra Pradesh policy that followed it, have converted eighteen years of field documentation into the factual basis for constitutional litigation rather than merely advocacy material. Every broken paver block, every encroached footpath, every illegally placed hawker cart or barricade on a designated pedestrian corridor, every utility pole installed in the middle of a walking surface, is now a constitutional violation whose duty bearer is named and whose remedy is legally enforceable.
The digital monitoring dimension of the AP policy - GIS mapping, drone surveys, dashboard-based walkability indices, citizen audits involving resident welfare associations and disability groups - addresses the enforcement problem that has historically rendered infrastructure policy aspirational rather than operational. A policy mandate cannot survive contact with local municipalities that treat illegal street vendors as informal revenue streams, with utility agencies that dig pedestrian corridors without restoration timelines, or with contractors whose quality assurance processes are calibrated to pass inspection on completion day and fail within the first monsoon.
The GIS mapping of footpath conditions, updated by drone survey rather than by the contractor's self-certification, removes the information asymmetry that has allowed these failures to persist. When the walkability index for a specific stretch of road in Vijayawada or Visakhapatnam is publicly visible on a dashboard accessible to residents, journalists, disability advocates, and the courts, the municipal officer who approves the contractor's completion certificate while the drone footage shows an impassable surface is not merely negligent. He is producing a false record in a system whose transparency was specifically designed to prevent that record from surviving unchallenged.
The citizen audit mechanism is the policy's most democratically significant element and its most practically uncertain one. Resident welfare associations and disability groups, invited into the monitoring process as formal participants rather than occasional complainants, introduce the accountability of lived experience into a system that has historically been evaluated only by the people whose professional interest is in its appearing to function.
A wheelchair user who audits the footpath outside her home every week knows whether the paver blocks that were laid in January are still flat in August. She knows whether the clear zone that measured two metres on the contractor's drawings is now 1.2 metres because a transformer box was installed in the middle of it without the contractor's objection or the municipal authority's notice. Her knowledge, formalised as a citizen audit report, is a legal document in the framework the AP policy has established, and its systematic production across a network of organised citizen auditors creates a monitoring system whose geographic coverage and ground-truth accuracy no government inspection programme can match.
The real test of the AP policy's framework will be fought not in the policy document but at the street corner where the hawker's cart has been parked in the clear zone for twelve years, where the hawker's family depends on the income it generates, where the ward councillor's political relationship with the hawker's community is the governing reality of local governance in that ward, and where the municipal official who attempts to enforce the two-metre clear zone mandate will encounter a political economy that has accommodated the encroachment since before the policy existed and does not automatically restructure itself because a policy has been notified. This is the specific failure point of Indian urban policy across its entire history. Policies are drafted by experts but the streets are managed by local governments. The gap between the policy's intention and the street's reality is bridged by political will whose exercise is the least predictable element of the governance system.
The Supreme Court's constitutional declaration, however, has introduced into this gap a legal instrument that was not previously available to the pedestrian whose footpath has been encroached. Every hawker who occupies a footpath without authorisation in Andhra Pradesh is now obstructing a constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right. Every municipal authority that permits the encroachment to continue is now failing a constitutional obligation. Every contractor who lays a footpath below the mandated standard is now producing infrastructure that violates the fundamental rights of the people who will use it. These are not regulatory categories whose enforcement is discretionary or dependent on corporator patronage. They are constitutional violations whose remedy is available through Article 226 of the Constitution to any citizen who files a writ petition with a drone survey photograph and a walkability index reading as evidence.
A modern democracy is measured by whether its most vulnerable citizen can walk safely to work without risking her life. India's pedestrian death statistics - 36,000 in 2024, nearly one in five of all road fatalities - are not a measurement of bad luck. They are a measurement of a governance system that has treated the walker as a residual and built the roads accordingly. Andhra Pradesh's policy is the administrative acknowledgement that this measurement represents a constitutional failure rather than merely an infrastructure gap, and that the difference between the two determines whether the response is a road safety awareness campaign or a legally enforceable fundamental rights framework.
The policy has been notified and soon the drone surveys will begin, the citizen audits will start and the walkability indices published. The pedestrian, who trips on a broken paver block at the entrance to a government office in Amravati, will have a constitutional claim rather than merely a complaint form. The walker, forced onto the carriageway by a hawker cart in Guntur, will have a documented fundamental rights violation rather than merely an inconvenience.
The footpath, at last and by constitutional force, belongs to the person on foot. Andhra Pradesh has said so in policy terms. The streets must now say so in concrete and paver blocks and the absence, permanent and enforced, of everything that has no right to be there.
