The Last Walk: How a Father’s Five-Year-Old Son Gave India a New Fundamental Right

A father wakes up, readies his five-year-old son for school, and at nine in the morning sets out on the short, ordinary walk that millions of Indian parents make every day. There is no footpath. There is no pedestrian crossing. A tanker approaches from behind. It strikes the boy, crushing his waist and lower body. He does not survive.

This is how the Supreme Court of India begins its judgment in Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz & Anr. v. P. Ayyappan & Ors. (2026 INSC 647), delivered on 19 June 2026 by a bench of Justices Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha and Atul S. Chandurkar. What arrived before the Court as a routine motor accident compensation appeal (a father disputing a reduced award for his son’s death) became the occasion for the Court to declare, for the first time with this degree of clarity, that walking is not a residual activity tolerated at the margins of India’s roads. It is a fundamental right.

A Tragedy the Court Refused to Treat as Routine

The Court was unambiguous about what this case was not. It was not, the judgment states plainly, a case about road safety in the conventional sense: the Supreme Court has separately and continuously monitored road safety guidelines for over a decade through its ongoing oversight in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India. What the Court identified instead was something more foundational: the absence of any legal recognition that the simplest human activity, walking, carries with it an enforceable claim to safe space on India’s roads.

The bench’s language is unusually direct for a constitutional pronouncement. It notes, with something close to exasperation, that India built roads suitable for motorised vehicles while walkers were pushed to the margins, eventually treated as “a nuisance for the drivers who routinely run over the walkers and their footpaths.” The judgment traces this not merely to administrative neglect but to what it calls, frankly, a historical elitism: motorised transport was once the preserve of the wealthy, and as vehicles became affordable to the many, the infrastructure built around them simply expanded its dominance over shared public space, leaving walking (the activity every single person in the country engages in, rich or poor) without a legal champion.

“Walking, the Court suggests, has never been merely transportation in the Indian context; it has been protest, pilgrimage, meditation, and political method.”

Locating the Right Within the Constitution

The Court’s constitutional reasoning is built on a sequencing argument that deserves close attention. Article 19(1)(d)Article 19(1)(d)Guarantees the fundamental right to move freely throughout the territory of India. of the Constitution guarantees to all citizens the right to move freely throughout the territory of India. The conventional, almost unconscious assumption, the Court observes, is to read this as a right to vehicular movement: a right exercised on wheels. The Court rejects that assumption at its root: human beings walked long before wheels existed, and the primary right of movement under Article 19(1)(d) is, in the Court’s words, “the Fundamental Right to Walk, a right that precedes the right to move on wheels.”

From this historical and textual premise, the Court draws a striking operational consequence: the citizen’s fundamental right to walk on a demarcated footpath is primary, and “shall have priority over movement by motorised vehicles.” This is not a balancing test between competing interests of equal constitutional weight. It is a hierarchy, with the pedestrian’s claim to safe passage placed above the motorist’s claim to unobstructed road space.

The judgment does not stop at Article 19(1)(d). It situates walking within a wider constellation of rights: expressive, associational, and congregational rights under Articles 19(1)(a), (b), and (c), by pointing to walking’s deep roots in Indian civic and cultural life. The judgment offers, almost as a meditation, a list of walking’s many forms in Indian experience: the Nagar Sankirtan processions that reclaim public streets as cultural space, the eight-centuries-old Pandharpur Wari pilgrimage that temporarily dissolves caste hierarchy among its walkers, the Kanwar Yatra’s penitential trek, Gandhi’s 241-mile Dandi March that turned an act as simple as walking into the engine of anti-colonial resistance, and Vinoba Bhave’s 70,000-kilometre Bhoodan Movement walk to persuade landowners into voluntary land redistribution. Walking, the Court suggests, has never been merely transportation in the Indian context; it has been protest, pilgrimage, meditation, and political method. That the word “pedestrian” has, in contemporary usage, acquired a faintly pejorative tone is, in the Court’s assessment, a measure of how far the country’s legal and infrastructural imagination drifted from this richer history.

The Motor Vehicles Act’s Blind Spot

One of the judgment’s more pointed observations concerns the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, the closest thing India has to a comprehensive road-use statute, and a law the Court insists has never been, and was never intended to be, a charter for pedestrian rights. The Act’s lineage traces back to its 1939 predecessor, designed primarily to standardise commercial transport and generate revenue through registration, licensing, and permits. Its modern successor continues that orientation: licensing of drivers, registration of vehicles, control of transport undertakings, insurance, and claims tribunals, all built, in the Court’s framing, around the vehicle as the legislative subject, with human interests treated as merely incidental: a constraint the vehicle must not violate rather than a right the law affirmatively protects.

The Court acknowledges that the 2017 Motor Vehicles (Driving) Regulations introduced some pedestrian-protective language, defining “Road User” to include pedestrians, and imposing duties on drivers to take special care around vulnerable road users. But it characterises these provisions as, at most, guiding principles for drivers, falling well short of recognising a fundamental right to walk on a demarcated footpath, let alone establishing that such a right takes priority over motorised movement. Tellingly, the Court notes that even the Motor Vehicles Act itself has never been equipped with a dedicated full-time regulatory body (the Transport Authorities under Chapter V do not qualify as such), meaning that India’s primary roads legislation has, by the Court’s own account, left both pedestrian rights and effective regulatory oversight as persistent gaps.

A Right Without a Statute And a Court That Says So

What makes this judgment unusual, beyond its substantive declaration, is its explicit acknowledgment of its own institutional limits. The Court draws a comparison to other fundamental rights that have, over time, been given statutory flesh: the Right to Education Act, 2009, which converts the Article 21AArticle 21AGuarantees the fundamental right to free and compulsory education for children aged 6 to 14. right into specific obligations on governments, local authorities, schools, and teachers, backed by a regulator in the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights; the National Food Security Act, 2013, which operationalises the Article 21 right to basic sustenance through Food Commissions and District Grievance Redressal Officers; and the Right to Information Act, which assigns duties to designated Public Information Officers and remedies through Information Commissions.

The right to walk, the Court notes with evident concern, has no such statutory architecture, despite being integral to Articles 21 and 19(1)(d). The judgment does not simply declare the right and leave the rest to future litigation. It directs the Registry to send copies of the judgment to the Ministries of Housing and Urban Affairs, Rural Development, and Road Transport and Highways, asking them to consider the necessity of a dedicated legal framework, and to the Law Commission of India, to examine what such a statute should contain: declaration of the right, identification of duty bearers, and provision of remedies, following the template the Court itself lays out from the RTE Act, the Food Security Act, and the RTI Act.

This is a court not just adjudicating a dispute but attempting to seed legislative reform, recognising that a right declared by judicial pronouncement alone, without the institutional machinery of a regulator, enforceable duties, and accessible remedies, risks remaining aspirational.

“If a road exists, there is now an enforceable duty on Urban Development Authorities, Municipal Corporations, Municipalities, and Panchayats to ensure a footpath is demarcated and maintained alongside it.”

What the Right Actually Requires

The Court is concrete about what follows from this declaration. If a road exists, there is now an enforceable duty on Urban Development Authorities, Municipal Corporations, Municipalities, and Panchayats to ensure a footpath is demarcated and maintained alongside it. This, the judgment states, is “the minimum of the minimum duty that a municipal authority owes to the citizens.” Violation of this duty entitles citizens to restitutionary remedies through constitutional remedies or under Sections 38 to 40 of the Specific Relief Act, 1963Specific Relief Act, 1963A law providing remedies for persons whose civil or contractual rights have been violated., which govern enforcement of public duties; and this remedy exists independently of, and in addition to, whatever compensation a victim’s family might separately claim under the Motor Vehicles Act for an accident itself.

The judgment closes its declaratory portion with three formal holdings: that the right to walk is a fundamental right under Part III of the Constitution, integral to Article 19(1)(d) read with Articles 19(1)(a), (b), (c), and Article 21, and that this right extends to demarcated footpaths with priority over motorised vehicle movement; that this right carries a correlative duty on local governance bodies to demarcate, construct, maintain, and safeguard footpaths; and that violation of the right entitles citizens to constitutional and legal remedies independent of Motor Vehicles Act remedies.

The Compensation, Finally

Only after this extended constitutional discussion does the judgment turn to what brought the case to the Supreme Court in the first place: a father’s claim for compensation following his son’s death. The Motor Accidents Claims Tribunal had awarded Rs. 7,82,000; the High Court, hearing cross-appeals, had reduced this to Rs. 4,70,000.

The Supreme Court held that the High Court erred in cutting the award down, and recalculated the compensation by applying the methodology recently laid down in Karuna Parmar v. Prakash Sinha (2025 INSC 1244). A case involving the death of a six-year-old in similar circumstances, using the minimum wage notification for skilled workers, adding 40 percent for future prospects, deducting 50 percent for personal expenses, and applying a multiplier of 18. The recalculation yielded a total award of Rs. 11,44,628, to be paid within two months, covering loss of dependency, loss of consortium, loss of estate, and funeral expenses.

A Case Renamed, A Question Reopened

In a final procedural move that signals how seriously the Court intends to be taken on this question, it directed that the case be re-numbered as a petition under Article 32Article 32Grants the right to move the Supreme Court directly for the enforcement of fundamental rights. of the Constitution, with its cause title changed to Re: Fundamental Right to Walk and Footpath, and impleaded the Government of India (through the same three ministries) as a party. The Additional Solicitor General has been requested to assist the Court going forward.

What began as the appeal of a grieving father seeking adequate compensation for his son’s death has been transformed, by the Court’s own design, into an ongoing constitutional proceeding that will outlive this judgment. The five-year-old who never reached his school that morning has, in death, become the occasion for a declaration that may, if the legislature and municipal bodies respond as the Court has asked them to, eventually give millions of Indian pedestrians something they have never formally had: a footpath that the law recognises as theirs by right, not by accident of urban planning or municipal goodwill.