Mayor Opens Walking Track Near Mumbai Zoo After SC Right to Walk Verdict
By Gajanan Khergamker
The Mayor’s decision to open the pathway adjoining the official residence near Veermata Jijabai Bhosale Botanical Udyan and Zoo for morning walkers is welcome, particularly in a Mumbai starved of accessible public spaces, but it also raises a question the Supreme Court has now made impossible to ignore: If the Right to Walk is a fundamental right, why must walking space still depend upon an authority deciding when and where citizens may walk?
The pathway, opened from 6 am to 9 am after morning walks inside the Mumbai Zoo popularly known as Rani Baug / Ranichi Baug were discontinued following Central Zoo Authority guidelines requiring a disturbance-free period for animals before visitors arrive, is a reminder of both the city’s hunger for open space and the peculiar manner in which pedestrian access continues to be treated as something that can be granted rather than an entitlement that must be protected.
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| The Mayor has permitted walkers to use a pathway prevented by the Central Zoo Authority guidelines earlier |
The timing is significant. On June 19, 2026, the Supreme Court, in Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz v. P. Ayyappan, recognised the Right to Walk on demarcated footpaths as a fundamental right and placed a corresponding responsibility upon urban development authorities, municipal corporations, municipalities and panchayats to demarcate, construct, maintain and safeguard pedestrian infrastructure. The judgment therefore does considerably more than ask governments to repair pavements; it alters the constitutional hierarchy of the street by making pedestrian movement something public authorities are duty-bound to facilitate, rather than something motorists and competing civic demands may accommodate only after their own requirements have been met.
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For Mumbai, where pedestrians have for decades been expected to negotiate broken pavements, parked vehicles, utility boxes, construction material, open drains, encroachments and disappearing footpaths while roads are planned primarily around vehicular movement, the implications are considerable. The Mayor’s walking track may provide a welcome stretch on which citizens can walk, but the Supreme Court’s intervention demands something far more fundamental: Mumbai must begin treating every usable footpath, pedestrian crossing and accessible walking corridor as part of the constitutional infrastructure of the city, rather than as public space that can be opened, closed or improvised according to administrative convenience.
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| Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde |
The circumstances are understandable. Morning walking inside the zoo had to be discontinued following guidelines requiring a disturbance-free period for animals before visitors arrive, and the pathway adjoining the Mayor’s residence emerged as an alternative. There is nothing objectionable about finding such a solution; indeed, it is precisely the kind of practical civic response a city needs. But a city cannot address its pedestrian needs through a succession of special openings and temporary permissions whenever an existing walking space becomes unavailable. A fundamental right cannot ultimately operate as a civic favour.
For years, Mumbai’s public-space debate has revolved around scarcity. Roads must carry traffic, pavements must accommodate utilities, commercial establishments require loading space, parking must be provided, construction needs barricading, hawkers require livelihoods and public projects require temporary occupation. Every claim may have legitimacy, but the cumulative consequence is that the pedestrian is invariably asked to understand that everyone else has a legitimate claim on the street and that walking is what must be negotiated after those claims have been accommodated.
The Supreme Court has challenged that logic at its foundation. It has not declared that every inch of urban land must become pedestrian space, nor abolished reasonable restrictions on movement; what it has established is that where a road exists, pedestrian infrastructure is not an optional embellishment to be supplied when budgets permit but part of the corresponding constitutional duty of public authorities. That changes the accountability conversation: a broken footpath is no longer merely a broken footpath, an absent footpath beside a heavily trafficked road is no longer merely poor planning, and a pedestrian corridor blocked by construction material or vehicles is no longer simply an inconvenience.
The implications are particularly important for persons with disabilities, older citizens and children, who cannot simply step onto the carriageway when a footpath disappears. The imaginary pedestrian in many road designs appears to be a healthy adult capable of jumping over an obstruction, squeezing past a parked vehicle, negotiating uneven paving and moving quickly enough to avoid traffic. Real cities contain wheelchair users, people with prams, people carrying groceries, those using walking sticks and children moving at different speeds. A footpath that exists technically but cannot actually be used cannot plausibly satisfy the spirit of a constitutional right.
And, this is why the judgment must not be reduced to a campaign for better paving blocks. The Supreme Court has placed walking within a wider constitutional framework connecting movement with life, expression, assembly and association, recognising that walking is not merely a transportation mode but an essential component of participation in urban life. A citizen walking to a railway station, a child walking to school, an elderly person walking to a neighbourhood shop or a worker walking home is not merely occupying a pavement; each is exercising the ordinary freedoms through which a city becomes a lived public space.
Mumbai should understand this immediately. A city that cannot be walked cannot genuinely claim to be publicly accessible. A neighbourhood where an elderly person cannot reach a shop without stepping onto the road, a child cannot walk safely to school, a wheelchair user cannot cross a junction or a commuter cannot reach a railway station without negotiating traffic is not merely inconveniently designed; it is a city that has distributed mobility according to physical ability, income and access to private vehicles.
For decades, speed has been treated as the clearest measure of urban progress - faster corridors, wider roads, shorter journey times and greater vehicular throughput - while the pedestrian has been expected to adapt to whatever infrastructure remains. The Supreme Court introduces another constitutional metric: whether the citizen on foot has been given the space, continuity and safety necessary to move freely. The statistics make that question difficult to dismiss. Parliament was recently informed that 11,386 pedestrians were killed on National Highways alone in 2024, with Maharashtra accounting for 1,139 deaths, while pedestrian deaths on National Highways had risen by more than 43 per cent between 2020 and 2024.
Yet pedestrian deaths are routinely individualised. A person is struck, an FIR is registered, the driver becomes the immediate subject of investigation and compensation proceedings follow. What receives far less attention is the infrastructure that may have placed that person in danger in the first place ... a missing footpath, an unsafe crossing, an inaccessible junction or an obstruction forcing pedestrians into moving traffic. The Supreme Court has now brought that infrastructure into the constitutional conversation.
Mumbai therefore cannot respond merely by repairing a few prominent pavements or creating isolated pedestrian-friendly stretches. It needs an audit of its pedestrian network, street by street and ward by ward, undertaken with the seriousness normally reserved for carriageways. Footpaths need continuous demarcation, proper crossings, accessible kerbs, drainage, lighting, maintenance and protection from encroachment; municipal departments, traffic police, utility agencies, contractors and road-owning authorities must stop operating as though pedestrian space is an administrative leftover available to whoever reaches it first.
And there must be accountability for interruptions, because a footpath that disappears whenever a road is dug up, a building is constructed, a utility line is repaired or a vehicle needs parking is not genuinely protected pedestrian infrastructure. Perhaps the most important word in the Supreme Court’s formulation is not 'walk' but 'duty': a fundamental right without a duty-bearer remains an aspiration, whereas the Court has identified the duty-bearers and recognised remedies when the right is violated. The next stage must therefore be administrative systems through which citizens can demand pedestrian infrastructure, authorities can be held responsible for maintaining it and failures can produce consequences.
Andhra Pradesh appears to have understood this shift faster than many other states. Its 2026 Pedestrian Safety and Universal Accessibility Policy seeks to make future road infrastructure safe, accessible and obstacle-free while bringing municipal authorities, revenue officials and police into the implementation chain, with universal accessibility incorporated into road design rather than treated as an afterthought once accidents expose failures. Mumbai should take note, not necessarily by reproducing another state’s policy word for word but by accepting the larger principle that pedestrian safety must be built into planning rather than repaired after citizens pay the price.
The Mumbai Mayor's opening a pathway to walkers is therefore both encouraging and revealing. It is encouraging because it demonstrates that public authorities can create access when they decide citizens deserve it; it is revealing because it shows how much of Mumbai’s public realm remains available through administrative permission rather than recognised as an ordinary entitlement. The initiative should consequently be seen not as the conclusion of the conversation but as its beginning: if a pathway can be opened beside the Mayor’s residence because citizens need somewhere to walk, how many other roads, junctions, neighbourhoods and public spaces could be made genuinely accessible if the same urgency were applied across the city?
The Supreme Court has now drawn the line. The walker comes first on the footpath; the motor vehicle does not possess a superior claim merely because it has an engine. The road is not simply a corridor for vehicles, and the pavement is not merely whatever remains after vehicles, parking, utilities and commercial interests have been accommodated. The footpath is part of the constitutional infrastructure of movement, and the Mayor’s walking track, valuable as it is, should remind Mumbai that the objective cannot be to create occasional islands of pedestrian access in a city otherwise hostile to walking.
Mumbai has spent decades asking how many more cars its roads can carry, how much faster traffic can move and how many more lanes can be constructed before congestion returns. It should now ask a more fundamental question: "How many more Mumbaikars can its streets allow to walk?" The answer will determine whether the Supreme Court’s Right to Walk remains an important judgment in a law report or becomes what it ought to be - a constitutional turning point in the way Mumbai, and Indian cities beyond it, are imagined, designed and governed.
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