India is a nation of walkers - but its cities forgot them

Pedestrians are also the second-largest group of road accident victims after two-wheeler riders. In Delhi and Mumbai, they account for more than half of all road deaths. According to a World Bank study, crashes already cost India an estimated 3-5% of its GDP each year through lost productivity, healthcare costs and disability.The Supreme Court case arose from one such tragedy: a five-year-old boy crushed by a truck while walking to school with his father.The judges responded with unusual eloquence. Walking, Justice PS Narasimha wrote, is "the simplest of the simple human activity, inextricably connected to life". Roads therefore impose a corresponding duty on the state to provide safe footpaths. "The fundamental right to walk on demarcated footpaths shall override the privilege of a motorised vehicle," he declared.The judgment challenges decades of Indian urban planning, where progress has often been measured in kilometres of expressways, flyovers and elevated corridors. Streets were engineered to move vehicles as quickly as possible, while the one road user every citizen inevitably becomes - the pedestrian - largely disappeared from planners' imagination."People know about the latest cars, but walking has become invisible," says Rishi Aggarwal, who has spent more than a decade trying to change that mindset in Mumbai.Through city walks and public talks, his advocacy group, Walking Project, encourages residents to notice what they have stopped seeing: broken pavements, blocked crossings and unsafe junctions - and compare them with the standards pedestrians are entitled to expect. "When people become apathetic, they stop observing the street," he says.NurPhoto via Getty ImagesZebra crossings - like this one in Kolkata - are treated as little more than road markings In a city where an estimated 15 million walking trips are made every day, Aggarwal argues, it is not just footpaths that have disappeared from view, but also the millions of people who depend on them.