The Supreme Court, in a judgment on June 19, declared walking a fundamental right. A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and A.S. Chandurkar ruled that using a demarcated footpath is protected under Articles 21 and 19(1)(d) – the right to life and to move freely. The bench added that pedestrian movement takes legal priority over motorised vehicles.The ruling arrives when India has quietly and systematically built cities around automobiles, not walking. Delhi has roughly 7.5 million registered active vehicles but formal parking infrastructure for fewer than a lakh. Roads have been widened at the expense of footpaths. Flyovers have been built at the cost of pedestrian crossings. The city has been reorganised, decade by decade, to move vehicles – and to leave people who walk at the margins, literally and politically.Meanwhile, nearly two pedestrians have been killed on Delhi’s roads every day, going by data from the 2024 Delhi Crash Report 2024.And Delhi is not an exception. The dynamics of elite encroachment, selective enforcement, and the systematic privileging of cars over people are visible, in varying degrees, across Indian cities.That the Supreme Court has now had to remind the state of its constitutional duty towards pedestrians is not a victory. It is an indictment.The infrastructure and governance deficitThe deficit of walking infrastructure in the national capital is a critical failure of governance. According to the India Status Report on Road Safety 2024, 44% of Delhi’s roads have no footpaths.Of the footpaths that do exist, only 26% meet the minimum standards set by Indian Roads Congress, which specifies a pedestrian walkway of at least 1.8 metres width. Across Delhi, effective pedestrian width for the footpaths had fallen below 0.8 metres – less than half the legal minimum.Elderly residents and schoolchildren are pushed onto the carriageway as a daily routine. For a wheelchair user, there is no usable footpath space at all. The city’s residents pour into this deficit whenever they walk.A footpath on Satyawati Marg, Delhi, blocked by parked vehicles, reducing the pavement to an overflow car park. Credit: Google Street ViewAnd here is where the public conversation usually goes wrong. The dominant image of encroachment in Delhi, and across the country, is of the rehri-wallah or the thela-wallah – the street vendor. This image, while true is incomplete, and this incompleteness is political. It persists despite enactment of the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act, 2014, which explicitly recognises street vending as a legitimate urban livelihood and provides legal protections against arbitrary eviction.Yet, street vendors continue to be portrayed as illegal encroachers rather than rights-bearing workers, obscuring the structural causes of inaccessible and poorly maintained footpaths.Anti-encroachment drivesResidential street in Sarita Vihar, Delhi, with cars overflowing onto pavements and public space.Anti-encroachment drives follow a recognisable script: municipal workers arrive, vegetable carts are cleared, photographs are taken and the footpath is briefly, photographically, cleared of obstructions. The drive conducted over four days in June across 144 Delhi locations yielded over 55,000 challans, of which 1,264 targeted rehri-patri occupations.In the same drive, 3,123 vehicles were towed or impounded for illegal parking, abandonment or obstructing roads and pedestrian pathways. Clearly, privately-owned motor vehicles, predominantly four-wheelers, required more enforcement action than street vending. Yet this figure rarely leads the coverage of encroachment concerns or such drives.The SUV on the pavement is ‘ordinary’. The sabzi-wallah on the pavement is an ‘encroachment’. This signals towards an inequality which is actively produced by everyday governance.The aesthetics of elite informalityAny walk through Delhi’s upscale residential neighbourhoods, with an eye for cars occupying roads and footpaths, reveals what enforcement drives do not typically reach. On several stretches, the footpaths have been quietly, incrementally subsumed within official plot lines. Public pedestrian space has been absorbed into private front yards. These extensions are finished in plaster and matching paint. Some are chained, gates installed, claimed as private property. They carry the deliberate aesthetic of permanence, of something that has always been there and belongs.This is aside from the massive road space that cars already occupy. No challan has been issued for this. No demolition notice has arrived. The municipal ward office, in several cases, is within easy walking distance of such encroachments.A private residence in Delhi with potted plants and a parked car occupying the public footpath, leaving no walkable space for pedestrians.These are informal structures – unauthorised extensions onto public land – but they look like private property. And in Delhi’s governance imagination, that distinction – between the aesthetically legible informality of the handcart and the aesthetically invisible informality of the extended boundary wall – determines who gets cleared away and who does not.The parking story operates through a related logic. Outside upscale restaurants, valets park customers’ vehicles on the public footpath. These valets are not municipal employees but hired by the restaurants to manage public spaces for private use. One valet, Suresh, working the same stretch for three years near Civil lines, has been fined twice by traffic police. The restaurant owner has not been penalised once. The informal worker absorbs the enforcement cost; the property-owning business absorbs the benefit.Cars parked on the footpath outside restaurants in Civil Lines, Delhi, forcing pedestrians onto the road. Source: Google Street ViewMeanwhile, Delhi builds elaborate multi-level parking structures that sit largely empty —crores of public infrastructure lies wasted – while streets and footpaths are choked by the same vehicles that, in theory, those facilities were meant to absorb. A city starved of space for housing and basic amenities finds it easy to create parking monuments, but hard to protect a footpath.Premium cars occupying tiled public frontage outside a restaurant in Delhi after dark.Towards a just policy for walkabilityThe Supreme Court has done the constitutional work. What remains is administrative will of a specific, politically uncomfortable kind.The boundary wall extensions across Delhi are not hidden. They are finished, painted and visible to every resident, every RWA office-bearer and every MCD ward official who passes them. Their persistence is not merely a product of ignorance, rather, it is a product of collective ratification.The RWAs that regularly petition for stringent vendor evictions have watched driveway creep absorb public pedestrian space for years. The middle-class residents who invoke “order” and “cleanliness” when arguing for hawker-free footpaths park their vehicles on those footpaths every morning. This is not individual hypocrisy. It is a governance arrangement – one in which the formal language of encroachment has been so selectively applied that its selectivity now feels like common sense.A just policy for walkability must begin with an honest accounting. Footpath audits mandated for Delhi must map boundary wall extensions and chronic parking of vehicles on public land, and this must be done with the same granularity the government applies to vendor stalls. Any audit that counts handcarts but leaves out driveways will produce a document that launders the existing enforcement hierarchy instead of correcting it.The restitution that the court has recognised as remedy – available to any citizen whose footpath has effectively been privatised – should be actively publicised in the very neighbourhoods where elite encroachment is most entrenched. Pedestrians in Delhi who cannot walk on their own street have legal standing to seek redress. Most do not know this, and the residents who benefit from that ignorance have little incentive to change it.Furthermore, any policy for walkability needs to accept that pavements are also sites of work and livelihoods. Street vending is already legally and constitutionally protected. Car parking is not. Yet, cars – the single most space-occupying element in Indian cities – continue to enjoy disproportionate access to public space. A genuine policy geared to allow walkability must be accompanied by measures that reduce dependence on private vehicles, regulate parking and reclaim public spaces for people.The right to walk is formally universal. The challenge now is political. Whether that right becomes meaningful depends on whether governments are willing to apply the law consistently, regulate private vehicles with the same seriousness they apply to regulating informal livelihoods and acknowledge that street vendors are not the biggest obstacle to walkability but the cars that have appropriated public spaces unchecked. Pedestrians and street vendors can coexist on our pavements, but only if we first prioritise people over cars.Vishavjeet Dhanda is an urban geographer and doctoral researcher studying Delhi’s streets, informality, public space and everyday urban life through ethnography. Aravind Unni is an urban practitioner and policy researcher focusing on inclusive cities, urban planning and climate justice in Indian Cities.(All photos by authors, Google Street View.)