Pedestrian pay-off: Let footpaths lead India’s way to faster economic growth

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In a Peak Bengaluru moment this month, a walking tour group organized a 15-day ‘BLR Walkfest,’ getting people to find out if the city is ‘walkable.’ True to the city’s brand-it-and-we’ll-do-it culture, about a hundred people signed up for every walk, which included talks on historic landmarks and lots of filter-coffee drinking, to see if they could do what millions of Indians do daily—use pavements to get around the city on foot. Many Indians ride in cushy carriages all their lives without ever stepping on a footpath, but a vast majority, most of them poor, either walk to work or work on paved sidewalks.

We are so short of pedestrian infrastructure that if jaywalking were illegal in India, as it is in some countries, it would legally be impossible to get from point A to point B on foot. This is not to say Indians don’t walk: 2011 Census data shows that more than 45 million Indians get to work at distant locations on foot, compared to 5 million in cars and 24 million on two-wheelers. The typical commute for these 45 million is in a range of 2-5km, which means that’s the likely distance they must walk.

But we clearly don’t have the infrastructure to support them. About 19% of our 150,000 road-accident deaths in 2021 were of pedestrians, going by road transport ministry data. If the numbers are sifted further to look at just street-mishap deaths in cities, pedestrians make up one-fourth of the fatalities, and more than half of those were people aged under 45.