Right to Walk as a Fundamental Right: Article 21, Street Vendors and Inclusive Urban Planning

GS II: Indian Constitution-Historical Underpinnings, Evolution, Features, Amendments, Significant Provisions and Basic Structure

Context: 

Expanding the horizons of Article 21 (Right to Life), the Supreme Court has declared the right to walk on demarcated footpaths a fundamental right, presenting a complex judicial challenge to balance pedestrian safety with the socio-economic livelihoods of street vendors.

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Judicial Reaffirmation and Institutional Frameworks

• The landmark ruling: A Supreme Court Bench consisting of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Atul S. Chandurkar explicitly elevated pedestrian rights during a compensation case involving a child struck and killed by a tanker lorry in Karnataka.
• The motorized bias: The court expressed deep regret that rapid motorization has transformed walking into a dangerous inconvenience, where vehicle owners routinely treat pedestrians as a “nuisance” to be cleared rather than equal stakeholders on the road.
• The fragmentation of responsibility: India currently lacks an overarching, uniform national law governing pedestrian rights. Instead, accountability is severely fractured across a patchwork of disjointed municipal laws, town-planning statutes, and street design guidelines.
• The bare-minimum safety standard: Under current execution paradigms, the state considers pedestrians “safe” if they face no immediate, imminent physical harm, entirely ignoring the necessity of continuous, dignified, and unobstructed walking networks.

The Constitutional Conflict: Pedestrian Passage vs. Right to Livelihood

• The legal clash: The judiciary is faced with a delicate balancing act between two competing dimensions of the Constitution: the pedestrian’s right to free passage (Article 21) and the street vendor’s right to livelihood under Article 19(1)(g).
• The Street Vendors Act, 2014: This progressive welfare legislation was enacted to protect the informal workforce from arbitrary eviction and police harassment. It legally mandates the formation of Town Vending Committees (TVCs) to conduct comprehensive physical surveys and establish clear, designated “vending zones.”
• Structural failure of Urban Local Bodies (ULBs): In a majority of Indian cities, implementation of the 2014 Act has completely broken down. Local municipalities have delayed or entirely abandoned the required spatial surveys and vending zone demarcations, resorting instead to aggressive, short-sighted “eviction drives” that fuel informal rent-seeking and extortion by local officials.
• The risk of exclusionary gentrification: Legal experts warn that if local authorities misinterpret the Supreme Court’s “right to walk” mandate, they may use it as a tool to aggressively “cleanse” public spaces of informal commerce, effectively criminalizing the survival mechanisms of the urban poor.

Comparative Policy Failures in Cultural Shift

Rights-based legislations in India often struggle to alter entrenched public habits when they rely solely on judicial or statutory declarations:

• The COTPA 2003 Lesson: The Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA) successfully curtailed public smoking over two decades not through massive “restitutionary remedies” (court-ordered compensation), but by utilizing consistent social messaging coupled with small, immediate fines.
• The Swachh Bharat Disconnect: Despite stringent anti-littering laws and nationwide mandates, the culture of littering persists because state policy centers almost exclusively on the citizen’s duty to segregate waste while consistently overlooking the state’s functional duty to collect segregated waste.
• The structural parallel: Just as waste management fails without infrastructure, the fundamental right to walk remains entirely meaningless if the state fails to allocate public funds to build and maintain physical, continuous footpaths.

Inclusive Urban Planning Frameworks and Interventions

• Moving beyond the “Encroacher” narrative: Modern urban planning must discard the archaic perspective that views street vendors as illegal encroachers. Instead, city designs must structurally integrate the informal economy into the baseline architecture of public spaces.
• The role of PM SVANidhi: The central government’s Prime Minister Street Vendor’s AtmaNirbhar Nidhi scheme actively recognizes vendors as an indispensable component of urban retail by providing collateral-free working capital loans, emphasizing their right to remain within the formal financial and spatial fabric of the city.
• The path to success: To prevent this historic judgment from becoming a mere legal tool invoked only for post-tragedy compensation, state governments must systematically redirect municipal infrastructure funds toward building continuous, barrier-free pedestrian walkways that run alongside legally demarcated, organized vending blocks.

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Conclusion

The Supreme Court’s constitutional nudge must not be used as an instrument to gentrify streets or displace the urban poor. True pedestrian safety and vibrant public spaces can only be achieved when India transitions toward inclusive urban planning—where city budgets actively prioritize the creation of continuous footpaths, and Town Vending Committees are legally empowered to balance the right to free passage with the right to livelihood.

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