Rajouri Has No Footpath for Its People

Step off a bus at the main chowk in Rajouri on any market day and you will find yourself navigating a maze: a parked scooter here, an awning there, a drain with no cover at another, compelling you to step on the road. In short, a footpath remains largely absent from its streets.

Rajouri sits in the Jammu division of Jammu and Kashmir, on the Poonch Highway roughly 155 km from Srinagar and 150 km from Jammu city. Linked to the birth of Sikh General Banda Singh Bahadur, ruled for centuries by the Jarral Rajputs as the old "Land of Kings," and now home to Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University, its history runs deep. The district borders the Line of Control, and the frontier's proximity has long meant a heavy security presence.

Demographically, it's among the Union Territory's richest tribal landscapes - Gujjars and Bakerwals, Scheduled Tribes since 1991, form a large share of the population, while Pahari speakers, recognised as a Scheduled Tribe in 2024, are the largest linguistic group. Many Gujjars and Bakerwals still migrate seasonally on foot with livestock between the plains and Pir Panjal's highland pastures.

History, ethnicity, and strategic weight all converge on this town. Its streets betray none of it.

The Everyday Reality of Walking in Rajouri

Spend an afternoon walking through Rajouri and the contradictions surface almost immediately. The roads are congested, often without any clear separation between vehicular and pedestrian space. Waste management is visibly inadequate, with garbage frequently spilling onto the very margins of the road where a footpath might otherwise exist, turning what little edge-space is available into an informal dumping ground rather than a walking surface.

Most conspicuously, footpaths - if they exist at all - are broken, encroached upon, or simply not designed with the pedestrian in mind. Walking through the main market stretches, one is constantly negotiating space with two-wheelers, parked vehicles, and shopfronts spilling onto whatever pavement remains.

Schoolchildren, elderly residents, and women carrying produce to and from the mandis end up walking on the same road-length used by trucks and buses on the Poonch Highway corridor. The risk is amplified by the hilly terrain, where blind curves and narrow shoulders leave almost no reaction time for driver or pedestrian alike.

For a town of Rajouri's size and administrative status, this is a striking gap, and one that becomes harder to defend once placed against both the academic record and current constitutional law.

Rajouri is not an Aberration

Rajouri's footpath problem is not an isolated municipal failing. It fits a pattern that Indian urban scholarship has documented for two decades, most notably in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). Sharit K. Bhowmik's 2005 EPW review of street vending across Asia traced why footpaths in South Asian towns rarely function as pure walking space. Waves of rural-to-urban migration, combined with the shrinking of formal-sector jobs, pushed large numbers of people into informal street vending, and the footpath became the cheapest available site to earn a livelihood. Bhowmik's larger point was that footpaths have long functioned as contested, multi-use spaces rather than dedicated pedestrian corridors, with policy consistently lagging behind that reality.

In another EPW piece, Jonathan Anjaria's 2006 study of street hawkers and public space in Mumbai, showed how the footpath becomes a site of continuous negotiation between vendors, pedestrians, shopkeepers, and the municipal state, with "encroachment" itself a contested and selectively applied label.

Both the articles suggest that the absence of usable footpaths in towns like Rajouri reflects an unresolved question in Indian urban governance about who footpaths are actually built for. In a small district town with limited municipal capacity and a population that depends on roadside informal trade for its livelihood, this tension is, if anything, sharper than in a metropolis, even though it receives far less scholarly or policy attention.

The available scholarship on Indian footpaths converges on a few consistent findings. Bhowmik (2003, 2005) established that street vending on footpaths is less an aberration than a structural response to inadequate formal-sector employment, meaning any footpath policy that ignores livelihoods is unlikely to hold on the ground.

Anjaria (2006) added the crucial insight that footpaths are governed as much through everyday negotiation and selective enforcement as through formal rules, which explains why encroachment persists even where laws against it already exist.

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay's essay on what he terms "counter-pedestrianism" extends this argument, describing how hawkers' associations have historically organised political claims to footpath space that rival the pedestrian's own, complicating any simple narrative of victim and encroacher.

More technical literature, including explainer pieces built on Indian Roads Congress guidelines, has separately established the physical standards a footpath must meet minimum widths, kerb heights, tactile paving for the visually impaired. Such standards are well documented on paper but rarely audited in smaller towns.

The Rajouri question is, thus, not just a simple complaint about missing pavement but also the lack of planning process, livelihood accommodation, and enforcement architecture that is needed to build and sustain them.

Rajouri on the Nationwide Map

It helps to place Rajouri's problem within the wider national context, because the town is far from an exception. Surveys of Indian cities using the Walkability Index - a composite measure of footpath width, obstruction, traffic volume, crossing safety, and lighting - have consistently placed the national average at a mediocre level even in cities considered India's best-planned. Smaller towns, especially in hilly areas, tend to fare worse.

National road-safety data tells a grimmer story. Pedestrians account for roughly a fifth of all road-accident deaths in India each year, with tens of thousands of lives lost annually to a category of accident that demarcated, well-maintained footpaths could largely prevent. Transport researchers have long argued that when walking becomes unsafe or unpleasant, people shift even short trips onto two-wheelers and cars, worsening congestion and air quality, a reinforcing cycle easy to see playing out on Rajouri's own choked market roads.

Court on Right to Walk

This gap becomes even harder to justify in light of a landmark development in Indian constitutional law. In June 2026, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices P.S. Narasimha and A.S. Chandurkar, ruling in Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz & Anr. v. P. Ayyappan & Ors., held that the right to walk on a safely demarcated footpath is a fundamental constitutional right, rooted not only in Article 21's guarantee of life and personal liberty but also in the freedom of movement under Article 19(1)(d).

The case arose from a tragic incident in which a young child was killed by a tanker while walking to school with his father, on a road with no pedestrian infrastructure at all, but the Court used the occasion to address a far larger structural failure in how Indian towns and cities are planned.

The judgment did more than state a principle. The Bench held that wherever a motorable road exists, there is a corresponding, enforceable duty on the state to demarcate and maintain a footpath alongside it, naming urban development authorities, municipal corporations, municipalities and panchayats as the bodies responsible. It also acknowledged that this right exists in something of a legal vacuum, directing that the judgment be sent to the Law Commission of India and the concerned central ministries so a proper statutory framework could be developed. The Bench observed that Indian urban planning has for decades been designed around the motor vehicle rather than the person on foot.

This is not an abstract ruling. It creates real, justiciable entitlements. Citizens who suffer injury or hardship because footpaths are absent, encroached upon, or poorly maintained can now seek constitutional remedies, restitution, and compensation from the concerned public authority, independent of compensation available under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988.

In the months following the judgment, several Indian cities launched footpath-clearance drives, which triggered protests from street vendors who argued, consistent with the EPW scholarship above, that the ruling was being used to displace livelihoods rather than expand safe pedestrian space.

That tension between the pedestrian's right of way and the vendor's right to livelihood is one any serious footpath policy in Rajouri will eventually have to confront too.

Spotlight on Footpaths Finally

The verdict finally brought a long-forgotten issue to centre stage. India's major newspapers covered the footpath ruling too. In its editorial, "Right of way," the Hindu argued the verdict would empower citizens long ignored by planners' skewed priorities. The Wire called the ruling an indictment of car-centric planning. Deccan Herald called India's footpaths scattered "remnants" that force walkers to hunt for safe passage. It also ran a piece linking the ruling to the government's fuel-saving push, since good footpaths could replace many short car and two-wheeler trips. Chennai's DT Next cautiously warned that civic bodies might simply clear out poor street vendors while leaving richer, better-connected encroachers alone.

This coverage makes two points that matter for Rajouri. First, the footpath crisis isn't a local issue; it's a nationwide governance failure now making headlines. Second, how the ruling gets enforced, evenly or selectively, will decide whether it helps daily life or ends up displacing the town's most vulnerable street-level workers.

Why Rajouri Cannot Afford to Wait

The case for footpaths in Rajouri is legal, practical, and urgent, also for reasons specific to the town itself. Rajouri's population includes large numbers of Gujjar and Bakarwal families who move seasonally on foot, often with children and livestock, along routes that intersect the same roads used by highway traffic. This combination makes the absence of pedestrian space more dangerous than it would be in a purely urban setting. The town also functions as an administrative, educational, and market hub for a wide, largely rural hinterland, which means that on any given day its narrow streets carry not just resident foot traffic but students commuting to Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University, patients visiting the district hospital, and farmers and herders bringing produce and livestock to market - all sharing space with buses and trucks moving along the strategically vital Poonch Highway.

The terrain of blind hill curves and narrow shoulders further strengthens the case for dedicated footpaths as a basic public safety measure. Additionally, a border town that wants to grow its university, its local trade, and eventually its tourism potential around the Pir Panjal foothills cannot do so convincingly while its own market roads remain unsafe to walk on. Safe footpaths are a precondition for the town's own economic and civic ambitions.

Rajouri's footpath-less streets are an unmet constitutional obligation. After the SC verdict, the municipal committee and district administration now have clear legal ground, and arguably an urgent duty, to survey Rajouri's roads, mark out pedestrian space, and build footpaths into any road-widening project underway or planned. Any credible response should also follow the existing research on the issue: vendors and hawkers aren't obstacles to clear overnight but longtime users of the same public space, whose livelihoods can be accommodated through demarcation and designated vending zones rather than sudden eviction drives.

A Rajouri with usable pavements, better waste segregation, and less congested roads wouldn't just be safer; it would finally match the dignity of its history. The Supreme Court has given that aspiration the force of law, national newspapers have given it visibility, and two decades of academic work have already mapped out the problem and the risks of an enforcement-only response. What's left is implementation in Rajouri and elsewhere.

Suggestions Keeping Rajouri in Mind

To be credible, any response has to fit Rajouri's own realities - hill terrain, highway traffic, a tribal and semi-nomadic population, limited municipal capacity - rather than copy a metropolitan template. A few concrete steps could help.

Start with a footpath audit of the town core. Before building anything, the Rajouri Municipal Committee should map which stretches of the main chowk, market roads, and Poonch Highway frontage have no footpath, which are broken or encroached, and which need priority near schools, the district hospital, and the university. Given limited funds, construction should proceed in phases, starting with the highest risk stretches, including school routes, hospital approaches, and the busiest market lanes, rather than spreading a thin effort across the whole town at once.

Design should fit the terrain, rather than following a textbook standard. Hill-town footpaths need proper drainage, non-slip surfaces, and kerb heights suited to slope and monsoon runoff, not a flat template borrowed from the plains. Vendors should be accommodated, not evicted overnight. A demarcated vending zones alongside a clear walking lane would avoid the backlash seen in cities that rushed straight to clearance drives.

Waste collection along road edges needs fixing first, since much of Rajouri's "missing" footpath space is really informal dumping ground; working door-to-door collection would reclaim usable width without laying a single new slab. Planning should also account for seasonal, non-motorised movement, taking into account the periods when Gujjar and Bakerwal families move through town on foot with livestock, rather than treat pedestrians as purely a car-versus-walker issue.

Residents and local vendor associations should be part of the planning stage. Consultation, not a top-down clearance order, is more likely to produce footpaths that sustain daily life. Since the ruling calls for statutory follow-up and possibly a national footpath audit in select cities, Rajouri's civic bodies and representatives should actively seek inclusion in any state-level rollout, rather than wait for attention that smaller towns rarely get by default.

None of this requires reinventing urban planning. All it needs is treating Rajouri, with its universities, markets, highway, and people who still travel long distances on foot, and as a town worth building a proper footpath for.