Use Centre’s grants to improve pedestrian friendly infra: Expert at Urban Adda 2026

New Delhi: Conditional grants under a central scheme of the Union housing and urban affairs ministry (MoHUA) can be used to ensure cities meet defined pedestrian-safety requirements, professor emeritus at IIT Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIP) Centre Geetam Tiwari said on Tuesday

New Delhi: Conditional grants under a central scheme of the Union housing and urban affairs ministry (MoHUA) can be used to ensure cities meet defined pedestrian-safety requirements, professor emeritus at IIT Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIP) Centre Geetam Tiwari said on Tuesday.

Speaking at an Urban Adda discussion organised by the Raahgiri Foundation on walkability as a right and the need to prioritise pedestrians over car users, Tiwari said states should translate the Supreme Court’s June 19, 2026 ruling recognising the right to walk into directions for cities. Municipalities, she said, should prepare pedestrian-safety plans with defined targets for infrastructure, crossings and speed management.

“There are a lot of technical guidelines on pedestrian safety already. It is only just notifying it, making it mandatory. So that is the first level the state can do,” Tiwari said.

The next step, she said, should be at the city or municipal level, with dedicated teams preparing long-term plans and annual targets.

“Next, I think the action lies at city or municipality level by establishing a dedicated cell which comes out with a master plan and some targets such as achieving a complete pedestrian-safe network in the next five years,” she said.

According to the Centre’s 2024 road crash data, pedestrians accounted for 36,526 deaths, or 20.6% of all road fatalities, making them the second-largest category of road users killed after two-wheeler riders. Pedestrian deaths rose from 12,330 in 2014 to 35,221 in 2023.

The discussion also highlighted the limits of central intervention under India’s federal structure.

Shubham Kumar, who leads policy advocacy at Crashfree India, said recognising the right to walk would not by itself determine which level of government would be responsible for implementing it. He cited the Law Commission’s 2009 report, which examined the need for pedestrian-safety legislation and proposed giving municipal authorities the three “Fs” — “funds, functions and functionaries”.

Kumar said MoHUA and other central institutions could support the process, but states would have to be brought into the implementation framework.

“MoHUA and other institutions can do, but as per the present constitutional scheme, there has to be some instruction to the states in order to realise this,” he said.

Shabnam Khan, an urban planner and research scholar working on safer school streets in Delhi, said pedestrian planning also needed to account for how children actually travelled to school, rather than focusing only on roads immediately outside school gates.

“The approach is often always to look from a vehicular perspective without taking note that a large proportion of the people are actually walking to school,” Khan said.

Children’s experiences highlighted the need for safer crossings, footpaths, street lighting, seating and designated areas for school buses and parents, she said. Scaling up such interventions would require funding and institutional capacity, with different elements of a school’s surroundings addressed as one ecosystem rather than in isolation.