Who stole your right to walk?

GURUGRAM: From Rashmee’s house in Sector 43, her office near the Huda City Centre
junction is barely a 15-minute walk. For Anasuya, who lives in a housing society behind Sun city in Sector 54, her daughter’s school is barely a 20-minute stroll.
Both tried once and then gave up for good. Rashmee found no clear footpath stretch to walk on. She had to step on to the road where vehicles jostled for the final inch and find spots where she could cross the thoroughfare when impatient motorists were not startling her or giving her the stares.
Anasuya, on the one afternoon she had decided not to drive but walk to fetch her daughter after a late quizzing session in school, found bikes whizzing by her on the pavement. And then a variety of vendors selling anything from nimbu paani to house décor artefacts.
“It took me half an hour to reach but the walk was stressful and I decided it wasn’t
worth it again,” she says. This was five years ago. Her daughter has since been using the school bus. Walking in Gurugramisn’t easy. Roads are continuously widened for cars and flyovers and underpasses get commissioned in numbers to resolve traffic gridlocks, but the same alacrity isn’t shown for pedestrian infrastructure — to begin with, uninterrupted and walkable footpaths that enable people get from one point to another without stress.
Footpaths, in fact, are missing in a large portion of the city, and those that exist are poorly maintained or encroached by vendors and stalls, parked vehicles, traffic lights, electricity poles and signboards. Construction debris and garbage strewn on pavements aren’t an uncommon sight either.
As much as Gurugramis conspicuously and in the drafts of urban planners a ‘car city’, just 3% of the total daily trips in the city are made in cars, according to the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority’s (GMDA) comprehensive mobility management plan (CMMP) that was released in 2020. The most — 33% — are by walking, followed by twowheelers (28%), non-motorised transport (14%), autos (13%) and other public transport (9%). The CMMP also acknowledged that Gurugramis illequipped to cater to pedestrians since footpaths of a total length of 154km cover only 28% of the road network. So, in most of the city, people end up walking on roads, which makes them vulnerable to accidents.
The areas with footpaths, the CMMP reported, include just the inner core of the city and areas like Huda City Centre and MG Road. “The sprawl of upcoming development areas like Badshapur, Narsinghpur, and beyond Dwarka Expressway (and) the new sectors are completely devoid of footpaths,” the report stated.
The CMMP also acknowledged encroachments on footpaths that make walking on them difficult and forcing people to step on to the roads. “It leads to a reduction in the carriageway capacity. Besides, the pedestrian walking experience on carriageways is neither safe nor convenient,” it noted.
Data from Gurugramtraffic police shows 31% of the total road fatalities last year involved pedestrians. As many as 125 of the 409 people who died in road accidents last year were walking. Yet, large-scale corrective measures are yet to be seen. Even as some footpaths get laid as part of road revamp projects or routine repairs, stretches and intersections, no plan has been devised to create a well-connected network of footpaths.
Similarly, drives to clear encroachments from footpaths happen in isolation and are effective only briefly. Violators return within a few days, again setting up shop until the administration conducts another drive as the vicious cycle continues.
“If I had the option of any other transport I could afford, I would not walk to my workplace though it is less than a kilometre from my home. I have narrowly escaped getting hit by vehicles several times,” says Sameena Bibi, who has been working as a domestic help in DLF 5.
Keeping the safety of pedestrians in mind and the implications a car-congested city has for climate change, this is the first in a series of articles TOI will publish over the next few days to draw attention to the infrastructure deficiencies that deny or stand in the way of Gurugrammers’ right to walk.