The Right to Walk: The Supreme Court Places Footpaths within the Constitutional Guarantee of Movement

There are judgments that settle difficult questions of law, and then there are judgments that make us look differently at something we have always taken for granted. Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz v. P. Ayyappan & Ors. belongs, for me, to the latter category. We speak often of the right to life, liberty, dignity, livelihood, privacy and movement. Yet, in the middle of these large constitutional expressions, there lies something remarkably ordinary—the ability of a person to simply walk. On 19 June 2026, the Supreme Court recognised precisely this ordinary act as a matter of constitutional significance. The Court held that the right to walk is a fundamental right under Part III of the Constitution, integral to Article 19(1)(d), and that the right necessarily carries within it a right to demarcated footpaths. What makes the judgment particularly significant to me is not merely the declaration of another facet of a fundamental right. It is the Court's recognition that a constitutional guarantee cannot remain confined to words in the Constitution if the physical conditions necessary to exercise that right do not exist. “A right to move means little if there is nowhere to walk.”

It began with a child walking to school

The case arose from a fact situation that is painfully commonplace. A father was walking his five-year-old son to school. There was no footpath and no pedestrian crossing. A tanker struck the child from behind. The child died. The proceedings began as a motor accident compensation claim. The Motor Accident Claims Tribunal awarded compensation; the High Court reduced it; and the matter eventually reached the Supreme Court. The Court could have disposed of the matter by determining the appropriate compensation. Instead, it asked the larger question hidden beneath the accident: why was a five-year-old child required to share the road with a tanker in the first place? That question takes the case beyond motor accident law. The absence of a footpath ceased to be merely an unfortunate circumstance surrounding an accident. It became a constitutional concern. The Court observed that we must disassociate the constitutional “right to move” from movement only on wheels. Walking existed before vehicular movement, and Article 19(1)(d), in its most elementary sense, protects the citizen's ability to move from one place to another. In the words of the Court: “The primary right of movement under Article 19(1)(d) is the Fundamental Right to Walk.” The simplicity of that proposition is perhaps what makes it so compelling.

Article 19(1)(d) begins with the pedestrian

Article 19(1)(d) guarantees to every citizen the right “to move freely throughout the territory of India.” Our constitutional understanding of movement has developed over time. In Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, AIR 1963 SC 1295, questions of movement and personal liberty arose in the context of police surveillance. In Satwant Singh Sawhney v. D. Ramarathnam, AIR 1967 SC 1836, the Court recognised travel abroad as an aspect of personal liberty under Article 21. Thereafter, Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248, fundamentally altered the manner in which Articles 14, 19 and 21 were understood, insisting that restrictions upon liberty must satisfy the constitutional requirement of fairness, reasonableness and non-arbitrariness. Maniyar Iliyaz takes that constitutional journey to perhaps its most elementary point. Before one speaks of the right to travel across States or across national borders, there must surely exist a right to step outside one's home and walk safely down a public road. The Court therefore did something important: it restored the pedestrian to the centre of the constitutional understanding of movement. For decades, our cities appear to have proceeded on the reverse assumption. Roads are first conceived for vehicles. Thereafter come parking, utilities and commercial requirements. Whatever remains is expected to accommodate the pedestrian. The constitutional order articulated in Maniyar Iliyaz is different. “The pedestrian is not using what remains of the road after vehicles have been accommodated. The pedestrian is exercising a fundamental right.”

A right to walk must mean a right to somewhere safe to walk

The most important part of the judgment, in my view, comes after the declaration of the right. The Court could easily have stopped at saying that walking is protected by Article 19(1)(d). Such a declaration would have been constitutionally attractive but practically incomplete. Instead, the Court held that the fundamental right to walk takes within its sweep the right to demarcated footpaths. This distinction matters. Constitutional rights cannot be meaningful only in theory. A citizen cannot meaningfully possess a fundamental right to walk if the State leaves him with the choice between walking in moving traffic and not walking at all. The Court therefore identified a corresponding duty: “where a road exists, there is a duty to ensure that demarcated and well-maintained footpaths exist for pedestrians.” The duty falls upon urban development authorities, municipal corporations, municipalities and panchayats. This is where Maniyar Iliyaz, to my mind, becomes more than a judgment on pedestrian safety. It becomes a judgment about constitutional governance.

The Constitution and municipal responsibility

The idea that municipalities cannot treat basic civic obligations as matters of administrative charity is not new. Nearly five decades ago, in Municipal Council, Ratlam v. Vardhichand, (1980) 4 SCC 162, the Supreme Court dealt with appalling sanitary conditions and public nuisance. Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer rejected the municipality's attempt to rely upon financial inability to escape its statutory obligations. Ratlam remains important because it established a principle which resonates strongly with Maniyar Iliyaz: where law imposes a public duty affecting basic conditions of human life, administrative inconvenience cannot become an answer to its non-performance. There is also a constitutional structure supporting this responsibility. Article 243W, read with the Twelfth Schedule to the Constitution, contemplates municipal responsibility over matters including urban planning, roads and bridges and public amenities. Correspondingly, Article 243G and the Eleventh Schedule recognise functions of Panchayats concerning roads and related infrastructure. The significance of Maniyar Iliyaz is therefore not that the Supreme Court suddenly made municipal bodies responsible for roads. That responsibility already existed. What the Court has now done is more consequential. It has connected the performance of that civic responsibility with the exercise of a fundamental right. The failure to provide pedestrian infrastructure can consequently move from the domain of “poor municipal administration” into the domain of constitutional accountability.

The pavement has appeared before the Constitution before

There is an interesting constitutional history surrounding the Indian footpath. In** Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, (1985) 3 SCC 545, pavement dwellers approached the Supreme Court against their eviction from pavements in Bombay. The Court famously recognised that the right to livelihood forms part of the right to life under Article 21. But Olga Tellis also recognised the essential public character of pavements. The Court observed that footpaths and pavements are public properties intended for the convenience of the general public and are carved out from public streets so that pedestrians may conduct their daily affairs with reasonable safety. That observation, made in 1985, acquires renewed significance after Maniyar Iliyaz. Similarly, in Sodan Singh v. New Delhi Municipal Committee, (1989) 4 SCC 155**, the Supreme Court considered the competing claims of street hawkers and the public over streets and pavements. The Court recognised street trading as protected under Article 19(1)(g), but not as an unrestricted right to occupy every portion of a public street. These cases reveal why the constitutional question surrounding a footpath is more complicated than simply ordering removal of every person occupying it. The Constitution may simultaneously encounter: • the pedestrian's Article 19(1)(d) right to walk; • the street vendor's Article 19(1)(g) right to carry on an occupation; • the pavement dweller's Article 21 interest in livelihood and shelter; and • the State's obligation to regulate public space in the larger public interest. The answer cannot be the extinction of one constitutional interest in favour of another. It has to be lawful urban regulation. The Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014 is relevant in precisely this context. It seeks to protect the livelihood rights of street vendors while simultaneously providing a statutory mechanism for regulating vending zones and maintaining public movement. Maniyar Iliyaz, therefore, should not be understood as a judicial licence for indiscriminate eviction in the name of clearing pavements. Rather, it requires the State to plan public spaces in a manner in which competing constitutional rights can coexist.

From livelihood and dignity to the physical conditions of liberty

The judgment also fits naturally within the larger development of Article 21. After Maneka Gandhi, Article 21 ceased to be understood narrowly as protection against physical deprivation of life or liberty. In Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi, (1981) 1 SCC 608, the Supreme Court explained that the right to life includes the right to live with human dignity and the basic necessities that make such a life possible. Olga Tellis extended the protection to livelihood. The environmental cases, including Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 SCC 598 and the M.C. Mehta line of decisions, demonstrated that the conditions in which life is lived—air, water and environment—can themselves acquire constitutional significance. Maniyar Iliyaz is another step in this constitutional method. It recognizes that physical infrastructure can determine whether liberty is real or merely theoretical. A Constitution may guarantee movement. But if a person with a disability, an elderly citizen, a school-going child or someone who simply cannot afford private transport cannot safely negotiate a public road, the constitutional promise becomes considerably less meaningful.

A question of dignity—but also equality

There is an equality dimension to the right to walk which deserves greater attention. The absence of a footpath does not affect everyone equally. A person travelling in a private air-conditioned vehicle may experience a missing pavement as an urban planning defect. For someone who walks several kilometres to work, a domestic worker travelling between homes, a child walking to school, an elderly person going to a nearby market, or a person moving between public transport stops, it can be a daily exposure to physical danger. Walking requires no ownership. No licence. No fare. No fuel. For a large section of our population, it is not an exercise in fitness or recreation. It is transportation. The constitutional recognition of walking therefore carries within it an important idea of substantive equality. Public infrastructure cannot be designed exclusively around those who possess private vehicles and then treat everyone else as secondary users of public space. A recent Delhi High Court application The effect of Maniyar Iliyaz is already visible. In Digamber Kumar v. National Insurance Co. Ltd., decided on 8 July 2026, the Delhi High Court dealt with motor accident claims arising from a vehicle running over persons on a pavement. The Court referred to Olga Tellis and relied upon Maniyar Iliyaz in reiterating the protected character of pedestrian space. The statutory framework is also instructive. Rule 39(3) of the Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017 prohibits a driver from driving on a footpath or cycle track except in circumstances permitted by law. The Rules of the Road Regulations have similarly recognised that pavements cannot simply become extensions of vehicular space. The principle, therefore, is moving beyond constitutional abstraction and into the everyday adjudication of road use and accident liability.

From compensation after death to prevention before it

Perhaps the aspect of Maniyar Iliyaz that I find most important as a lawyer is its approach to remedies. Ordinarily, the Motor Vehicles Act enters after the event. There is an accident. There is injury or death. Liability is determined. Compensation follows. But no amount of compensation can truly answer the question posed by the death of a five-year-old child walking to school. The constitutional obligation must operate before the accident. The Supreme Court therefore held that violation of the right to walk on demarcated footpaths may entitle citizens to invoke constitutional and legal remedies against the duty bearers for restitution and compensation, independently of remedies available under the Motor Vehicles Act. This has potentially far-reaching consequences. If the absence or destruction of pedestrian infrastructure infringes a fundamental right, why should a citizen necessarily wait for an accident before approaching a constitutional court? Why should a school have to wait until a child is injured before demanding a safe pedestrian approach? Why should persons with disabilities have to repeatedly negotiate inaccessible public infrastructure before the State recognises an obligation to correct it? The movement from post-accident compensation to pre-accident constitutional prevention may ultimately prove to be the judgment's most valuable contribution. Yet, declaration is easier than implementation As important as the judgment is, there is a question that inevitably remains. What happens tomorrow morning? Will the footpath outside our homes become walkable because the Supreme Court has declared walking a fundamental right? Obviously not. Our pavements disappear for many reasons. Some are encroached upon. Some are converted into parking. Some contain transformers, poles and utility installations. Some begin abruptly and end equally abruptly. Some are constructed at heights or gradients that make them inaccessible to elderly persons or persons with disabilities. And in many places, there is simply no pavement at all. A constitutional declaration cannot, by itself, redesign an Indian city. The Supreme Court appears conscious of this limitation. It directed that the matter continue under Article 32 as Re: Fundamental Right to Walk and Footpath, and involved the Union Ministries concerned with housing and urban affairs, rural development, and road transport and highways. It also contemplated the need for an appropriate legal framework governing the right and its enforcement. That continuation is important. The real constitutional test will not be whether courts can beautifully articulate a right to walk. It will be whether governments can translate it into walkable cities and villages.

The Constitution confrontation

As lawyers, we are accustomed to locating constitutional rights in grand confrontations between the individual and the State. Free speech. Personal liberty. Privacy. Arrest. Equality. Due process. Perhaps that is why Maniyar Iliyaz stayed with me.It finds constitutional law in something far less dramatic—a father holding his child's hand and walking him to school. It reminds us that constitutionalism is not only concerned with extraordinary exercises of State power. It is equally concerned with the ordinary conditions in which citizens live their lives. The ability to step out of one's home, walk to school, reach a bus stop, visit a market, cross a road or simply travel through one's own city without being pushed into the path of moving vehicles is not an extravagant demand upon the State. It is perhaps the most basic expression of freedom of movement. And once the right to walk is recognised, the footpath itself acquires a different legal character. It is no longer merely an engineering feature alongside a road. It is constitutional infrastructure.

What I take away from Maniyar Iliyaz

I do not read Maniyar Iliyaz as merely adding another right to the ever-expanding catalogue under Articles 19 and 21. I read it as making a more fundamental point about rights themselves. A right is meaningful only when the conditions necessary for exercising it exist. Freedom of speech needs a space in which speech can be expressed. Access to justice needs courts that can actually be approached. The right to vote requires an electoral machinery through which the vote can be cast. And freedom of movement requires physical space through which a citizen can safely move. There is also something particularly compelling about the fact that this constitutional discussion arose not from a public interest litigation conceived around a grand proposition of law, but from the death of a five-year-old child and his family's claim for compensation. The Court could not restore what that family lost. But it could ask why the child was on the carriageway in the first place. That question changed the nature of the case. And perhaps that is what constitutional courts, at their best, sometimes do. They look beyond the immediate dispute and identify the systemic failure hidden underneath it. Ratlam told municipalities that basic civic obligations cannot disappear behind administrative excuses. Olga Tellis told us that life under Article 21 includes livelihood and that even those occupying pavements cannot simply be treated as invisible citizens. Sodan Singh required public streets to accommodate livelihood without extinguishing their public purpose. Maneka Gandhi taught us to read liberty with fairness and dignity. And now, Maniyar Iliyaz tells us something remarkably simple: “before the road belongs to the vehicle, the Constitution protects the person who walks upon it.” The next time we step off a broken pavement, walk around a parked vehicle occupying a footpath, or find ourselves forced onto a carriageway because the pedestrian path has simply disappeared, perhaps we should no longer see it only as poor civic administration. There is now a constitutional question beneath our feet.

The Author appreciates and acknowledges the efforts made by her team in putting the research on this together.

Official references

• Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz & Anr. v. P. Ayyappan & Ors., 2026 INSC 647. (https://api.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2024/42514/42514_2024_3_1501_71888_Judgement_19-Jun-2026.pdf) • Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248. • Municipal Council, Ratlam v. Vardhichand, (1980) 4 SCC 162. • Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi, (1981) 1 SCC 608. • Olga Tellis & Ors. v. Bombay Municipal Corporation & Ors., (1985) 3 SCC 545. • Sodan Singh v. New Delhi Municipal Committee, (1989) 4 SCC 155. • Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar, (1991) 1 SCC 598. • Satwant Singh Sawhney v. D. Ramarathnam, AIR 1967 SC 1836. • Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, AIR 1963 SC 1295. • Digamber Kumar v. National Insurance Co. Ltd. & Ors., Delhi High Court, decided on 8 July 2026.

Statutory and constitutional framework Articles 14, 19(1)(a), 19(1)(b), 19(1)(c), 19(1)(d), 21, 32, 243G and 243W of the Constitution of India; Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules to the Constitution; Motor Vehicles Act, 1988; Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations, 2017; Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014.

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