Case Citation: 2026 SCC OnLine SC 1162; 2026 INSC 647 (India).
Court: Supreme Court of India
Bench: Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha J; Atul S Chandurkar J
Judgment Authored by: The Bench (delivered by the Court)
Date of Judgment: 19 June 2026
Civil Appeal Nos.: 4665-4666 of 2025
Parties:
● Appellants – Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz and Another (the parents of the deceased five-year-old child who filed the compensation claim).
● Respondent – P Ayyappan and Others.
Introduction
The Supreme Court of India has long treated ordinary motor accident appeals as occasions to say something larger about how citizens live and die on Indian roads.1 Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz v. P Ayyappan belongs to this lineage, yet it travels further than most decisions in the genre.2 What began as an appeal against an inadequate compensation award granted to a father whose five year old son was run over by a tanker while walking to school ended with the Court declaring, for the first time in unambiguous terms, that the right to walk on a safe and demarcated footpath is itself a fundamental right guaranteed under Part III of the Constitution.3 The decision is notable not merely for its outcome but for its method. Two judges, sitting in what was originally a routine compensation appeal, chose to reorder the constitutional hierarchy of
road users, placing the pedestrian above the motorist and imposing an enforceable duty on every municipal body in the country to construct and maintain footpaths wherever a road exists.4 This comment sets out the facts and reasoning of the judgment, situates the constitutional holding within the Court’s existing jurisprudence on Articles 19 and 21, and offers a critical assessment of both the doctrinal soundness and the practical workability of the right the Court has now recognised.
Facts of the Case
On an ordinary weekday morning, the appellant readied his five year old son and set out, as he did most days, to walk him to the neighbourhood school.5 The stretch of road they used had neither a footpath nor a pedestrian crossing.6 As father and son walked towards the school gate, a tanker approached from behind and struck the child, crushing his waist and lower body; the boy did not survive his injuries.7 The father approached the Motor Accidents Claims Tribunal seeking compensation of twenty five lakh rupees.8 By its award dated 30 May 2016, the Tribunal granted Rs 7,82,000 together with interest at six per cent per annum from the date of the petition until realisation.9 Both the appellant and the insurance company appealed to the High Court, the former seeking enhancement of the award and the latter seeking its reduction.10 The High Court dismissed the appellant’s appeal, allowed the insurer’s appeal, and reduced the compensation further to Rs 4,70,000.11 It was against this reduction that the matter reached the Supreme Court, nearly a decade after the accident itself, by which point what had begun as an ordinary claim for enhanced compensation was about to become the occasion for a considerably more ambitious constitutional pronouncement.
Issues Before the Court
Two questions occupied the Bench, one narrow and the other expansive. The narrow and conventional question was whether the High Court had been justified in reducing the compensation that the Tribunal had awarded to the bereaved father.12 The expansive question, which the Court appears to have set for itself rather than one squarely argued between the parties, was whether the right to move freely guaranteed under Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution includes, as its primary and antecedent content, a right to walk safely on a demarcated footpath, and if so, what correlative duties and remedies follow from the recognition of such a right.13
Arguments
The judgment records comparatively little adversarial argument on the constitutional question, which is unsurprising since neither party had originally framed the dispute in those terms.14 Having arrived at its conclusions on the scope of Article 19(1)(d), the Court appointed Mr Mamidipudi V. Mukunda as amicus curiae, impleaded the Union of India through the Ministries of Housing and Urban Affairs, Rural Development, and Road Transport and Highways, and requested the Additional Solicitor General to assist it on the statutory and regulatory questions the judgment itself raises.15 The compensation dispute, by contrast, proceeded on more conventional lines, with reliance placed on the Tribunal’s original award and on the method of computation the Court had adopted in an earlier decision concerning the death of a similarly young child.16
Judgment/Holding
On the compensation question, the Court held that the High Court had erred in reducing the award made by the Tribunal.17 Relying on its recent decision in Karuna Parmar v. Prakash Sinha, which involved the death of a six-year-old child, the Bench adopted the same method of computation. Notional daily wages under the Minimum Wages Act were used to fix a monthly and then annual income, to which forty per cent was added towards future prospects; fifty per cent was then deducted towards the deceased’s personal and living expenses, and the resulting annual loss of dependency was multiplied by eighteen.18 Applying this formula, the Court computed the appellant’s total entitlement at Rs 11,44,628, comprising the loss of dependency, loss of consortium, loss of estate, and funeral expenses, payable within two months of the judgment.19
On the constitutional question, the Court declared that the right to walk is a fundamental right under Part III, integral to the right of movement guaranteed by Article 19(1)(d) and connected to the freedoms of speech, assembly, and association under Article 19(1)(a) to (c), read together with Article 21.20 This right extends to safe and demarcated footpaths and is to take priority over movement by motorised vehicles.21 The correlative duty to demarcate, construct, and maintain footpaths was placed squarely on urban development authorities, municipal corporations, municipalities, and panchayats.22 Significantly, the Court held that violation of this right gives rise to a remedy that is independent of, and additional to, any claim available under the Motor Vehicles Act 1988, drawing in particular on the general power to enforce public duties under sections 38 to 40 of the Specific Relief Act 1963.23 The Bench went further, directing that the case be renumbered as a petition under Article 32 with the cause title changed to Re: Fundamental Right to Walk and Footpath, and recommended that Parliament enact a dedicated statute establishing a full time regulator for pedestrian infrastructure.24
Ratio Decidendi
The ratio of the case may be distilled into three connected propositions.
1. First, the right of movement guaranteed by Article 19(1)(d) is not exhausted by, nor even primarily concerned with, movement on wheels; walking is its original and primary content, and a citizen’s right to walk safely therefore commands constitutional priority over the interests of motorised traffic.25
2. Second, this right is not merely a negative liberty against state interference but generates a positive, enforceable duty on civic bodies that already qualify as “State” under Article 12 to demarcate and maintain footpaths wherever roads exist, since the absence of legislative implementation cannot be allowed to hollow out a right that is otherwise self-executing under Part III.26
3. Third, and perhaps most consequential for future litigation, the remedy for breach of this duty lies outside the compensatory architecture of the Motor Vehicles Act altogether, sounding instead in constitutional and equitable relief available under the general law.27
Critical Analysis and Observations
The judgment sits comfortably within a familiar arc of Indian constitutional interpretation that reads Article 21 expansively and in conjunction with Article 19, a method traceable at least to Maneka Gandhi v Union of India, where the Court first insisted that any procedure depriving a person of life or personal liberty must also satisfy the tests of Articles 14 and 19.28 The nine judge Bench in Justice K S Puttaswamy v. Union of India carried this method of composite reading further, treating the fundamental rights chapter as an integrated whole rather than a set of isolated silos, a technique that Maniyar Iliyaz borrows explicitly when it reads Article 19(1)(d) together with clauses (a) to (c) and Article 21.29 Viewed against this background, the doctrinal move in the present case is less revolutionary than it first appears; what is genuinely new is the object to which this well-established method has now been applied.
There is, however, a curious and unresolved tension between this judgment and Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, decided four decades earlier, in which the Court considered the claims of pavement dwellers evicted from the very footpaths that Maniyar Iliyaz now constitutionalises as pedestrian corridors.30 Olga Tellis recognised that a pavement, once occupied for shelter, can itself become the site of a livelihood protected under Article 21, even while upholding the municipality’s power to remove encroachments through fair procedure. Maniyar Iliyaz does not engage with this precedent at all, yet the two decisions will inevitably collide on the ground. Footpaths in urban India are contested space, shared uneasily by hawkers, the homeless, parked vehicles, and pedestrians, and a Court that has now constitutionalised the pedestrian’s claim to that space has left unanswered whose claim must yield when the two conflict.
The compensation portion of the judgment stands on firmer and more settled ground, building on the standardisation of motor accident compensation achieved by the Constitution Bench in National Insurance Co Ltd v. Pranay Sethi, which fixed the addition for future prospects and settled the multiplier method that both Karuna Parmar and, by extension, the present case go on to apply.31 This continuity is welcome, since unpredictability in the computation of compensation has itself been a persistent source of litigation before Indian tribunals.
The larger difficulty lies in enforcement. The Court has, in effect, legislated a national minimum standard for urban and rural infrastructure without addressing the fiscal capacity of the thousands of municipal bodies now saddled with this duty, a criticism that echoes older debates surrounding unfunded judicial mandates following decisions such as Vishaka v State of Rajasthan, where guidelines issued in the absence of legislation waited well over a decade for a statutory replacement.32 The judgment does not define what counts as a “demarcated footpath”, leaves open whether the standard must satisfy accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities, and says nothing about encroachment by hawkers or parked vehicles, precisely the situations most future litigants are likely to face. For infrastructure contractors, urban planners, and the motor insurance industry alike, this creates an unusual moment. Municipal corporations may now face claims quite apart from the insurer funded compensation regime that has, until now, absorbed most of the financial consequences of India’s road fatalities, and companies engaged in urban infrastructure delivery under schemes such as the Smart Cities Mission may find themselves drawn into the compliance conversation that the Court has just opened.
Conclusion
Maniyar Iliyaz @ Shaik Riyaz v. P Ayyappan converts an individual tragedy into a structural constitutional pronouncement, and in doing so it exemplifies both the promise and the peril of India’s rights expanding interpretive method. The recognition of a fundamental right to walk is intuitively appealing and doctrinally defensible, resting on a reading of Article 19(1)(d) that few would dispute once it is stated so plainly. Whether the right survives its own ambition will depend on what follows it: the legislation the Court has invited, the response of the Ministries and the Law Commission to its directions, and the willingness of municipal bodies working within limited budgets to treat footpaths as a matter of constitutional obligation rather than administrative convenience. Until then, the judgment stands as a powerful statement of principle whose ultimate value will be measured, quite literally, on the pavement.
You can write:
This case comment is written by Priyam Pratik, a first-year undergraduate law student at the Faculty of Law, University of Allahabad.
References
1 Maniyar Iliyaz alias Shaik Riyaz v P Ayyappan 2026 SCC OnLine SC 1162; 2026 INSC 647; S Rajaseekaran v Union of India WP (C) No 295 of 2012 (SC).
2 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1).
3ibid [4].
4ibid [9]–[10].
5 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1) [1].
6ibid [2].
7ibid [1].
8ibid [17].
9ibid.
10 ibid.
11ibid.
12 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1) [17]–[18].
13 ibid [3]–[4].
14 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1).
15 ibid [21].
16 ibid [18], applying the method adopted in Karuna Parmar v Prakash Sinha 2025 INSC 1244. 17 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1) [18].
18 ibid, following Karuna Parmar v Prakash Sinha 2025 INSC 1244.
19 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1) [19].
20 ibid [20(a)].
21 ibid.
22 ibid [20(b)].
23 ibid [20(c)] and [15]; Specific Relief Act 1963, ss 38–40.
24 Maniyar Iliyaz (n 1) [13] and [21].
25 ibid [4].
26 ibid [9]–[10].
27 ibid [15].
28 Maneka Gandhi v Union of India (1978) 1 SCC 248
29 Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd) v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
30 Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985) 3 SCC 545.
31 National Insurance Co Ltd v Pranay Sethi (2017) 16 SCC 680.
32 Vishaka v State of Rajasthan (1997) 6 SCC 241.
