The Supreme Court’s recent judgment, which recognises walking on demarcated footpaths as a fundamental right, has urban designers celebrating the scaling of well-designed streets nationwide. As India pursues Viksit Bharat, the ruling offers a real opportunity to reshape streets that have long defied the Western sense of urban order our planning norms espouse.

Prevailing urban design standards in India already institutionalise space for safe pavements within street rights-of-way. Yet the human cost of unsafe streets remains stark — a Government of India report shows the top 10 cities accounted for 46.34% of road accident deaths among all 50 Million-Plus Cities in 2024, with pedestrians accounting for 20.6%. Delhi recorded the highest toll, followed by Bengaluru and Jaipur.

So, why has the implementation of national standards for safe streets remained ineffective, and what can we do about it? India’s cities probably defy any centralised codes for safe street and pavement design. At the same time, most municipal authorities are not capacitated to customise the challenge. Given this gap between central norms and local realities, the court’s judgment offers an opportunity to re-evaluate standards that only partially align with the cities they were meant to serve.

Three structural problems merit attention.

The first concerns the mismatch between existing norms and India’s diverse urban contexts. National guidelines, i.e., the Indian Roads Congress’s IRC-103-2012 and the URDPFI Guidelines, were formulated to foster “healthy streets” that prioritise walking, cycling, universal accessibility, and road safety.

All norms prescribe footpaths up to 4 metres wide, with a non-negotiable minimum of 1.8 metres, even in resource-deficit areas. However, not all streets in Indian cities can accommodate this well-meaning standard. Such provisions may suit planned arterial roads, but prove largely unworkable in older precincts such as Chickpete, the weakly connected networks of peri-urban Hyderabad, or unplanned settlements in suburban Mumbai, where narrow streets and intense street vending leave little room for standardised pavement widths. The result is often a paradox: oversized footpaths on arterial roads with low pedestrian volumes, and impossible minimum-width mandates in the city’s most crowded localities.

The second problem is of scale and material specifications. India’s 4,500-plus cities allocate up to 25% of urban land to roads, most of which are local streets where pedestrian movement predominates. Building the pavements across this network to national specification, with concrete and standardised street furniture, far exceeds most municipal bodies’ administrative and financial capacity, leaving safe pavements unimplemented, while exacerbating urban heat islands.

The third problem is weak institutional ownership. Vehicle registration, traffic enforcement, street design, construction, and maintenance all fall under different jurisdictions. Devolving power from the State to municipal authorities is imperative, making them custodians of coordination, design, and maintenance of safe footpaths.

Elected and unelected officials must be equipped to orchestrate stakeholders with divergent needs and co-design streets with residents at the ward level. The court’s justiciable right must also translate into municipal incentives that drive ward-level action and political accountability.

If emulating Western standards is impractical, what are our options? The Ajmal Khan Road redesign in Delhi’s Karol Bagh offers a notable precedent: rather than extensive construction, UTTIPEC and DDA designers used painted lane demarcations, greenery for traffic calming, and modest street furniture, at a fraction of the ₹7 crore to ₹10 crore per kilometre cost of standard-compliant construction. Scaling up this approach demands a shift in mindset: designing and maintaining collectively, and building contextually and less rather than more.

For street design to foster inclusive communities, we need clear goals for walkable cities and revised standards for diverse urban contexts, including customised pavements and recycled sustainable material innovations. The court’s ruling on joint management of footpaths by ULBs, development authorities, and panchayats needs ratification to entrust ULBs as the primary custodians.

The pursuit of Viksit Bharat demands reframing our guidelines for wider societal outcomes, where we think beyond streets and pavements as urban design projects, and see them instead as processes for building strong communities.

(Champaka Rajagopal, PhD, is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi)