Hyderabad joggers’ manifesto: Give back our pavements before the election

HYDERABAD: With most of the pavement space in the city vanishing due to encroachment by vendors or road widening, city joggers, road safety experts and residential welfare associations demand pavements to be ‘given back’ before elections.


With only 450 km of pavement for 9,100 km of road, joggers and residential welfare associations are raising a serious question of road safety. Most of them demand a dedicated walking area and urge authorities to keep pedestrians in consideration while developing infrastructure.

Road number 45 in Jubilee Hills, the road near IKEA store and Ameerpet main road are a few prominent areas where width of pavement has reduced drastically due to road widening.

Road safety experts say that pedestrian guidelines make it necessary for all roads to have pavements. However, the real picture is a lot different from this idyll.

“Only the pavements which fall under Hyderabad Metro Rail Limited (HMRL) are walkable footpaths in the city that are free of encroachments and have safety measures like ramps. People using regular pavements falling under Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation’s (GHMC) purview can only walk probably a 100m and then forced to hit the road due to encroachments,” said Suresh Raju, a road safety expert and founder of Vaada Foundation, an organisation working for pedestrian safety. Officials, however, said, they have taken up special drives and have razed thousands of encroachments. “We have razed 12,000 footpath encroachments as a part of special drives,” said Viswajit Kampati, director, enforcement vigilance and disaster management (GHMC).

On the other hand, HMRL promises more pavements. “HMRL proposed 33 km of footpath of which 27 km has been completed and 7 km is underway,” said NVS Reddy, MD, HMRL.