Why Should the Supreme Court of India Descend to Street Level?

 

Why Should the Supreme Court of India Descend to Street Level?

This post refers to the newspaper item (The Hindu, May 15, 2025), reproduced hereunder.

Every Indian who reads the above has to commit suicide. Is it the place of the Supreme Court of India to direct the “States and Union Territories to frame guidelines to ensure proper footpaths for pedestrians”? Footpaths, as high as they may get along the pecking order of moving from one place to another, should not concern even the lowest rungs of the judiciary.

The above direction came when the Court was hearing “a case over the delay in the implementation of the cashless scheme for treating road accident victims.” If an Indian could commit a suicide a second time, she should do so promptly. The Court invoked a constitutional right, nothing less, in justifying this demand, while it is the bounden duty of the municipal council or the municipal corporation authorities. Only pedestrians like me would possibly be in a position to avail the “cashless scheme for treating road accident victims.”

I have blogged on people parking on the tiled pavement portions of a street in Srirangam, a suburb of Tiruchirappalli in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Pedestrians do not exist, and so do not have any rights, much less a constitutional right. The Court merely reached out as low as it can, and found vacuum!  

I know no one reads my blog posts and hence I may not be posting it in that space. But, I just might, to register my presence as an Indian pedestrian. That is just as well, as the justices of Supreme Court of India will have a ready excuse for not reading – “cannot expect to be aware of much less read through blog posts!”

Of course, they also would not have seen the movie State vs. Jolly LLB, a movie of such down to earth relevance for India−an SUV riding roughshod over pavement−where pavement dwellers (the homeless, to be honest about it) were sleeping.

The critical point made by the defence attorney in the cause of a rich youngster was that the pavement is not a place for sleeping. The prosecutor for the homeless, played so fine and nonchalantly by Arshad Warsi, says in response that pavement isn’t the place for driving an SUV either! This clinches the case for the prosecutor. The honourable justices of the Supreme Court of India could not be expected to sit through the movie with just a minute of relevant dialogue!

Every evening I walk about four or five kilometres and “every step I take” (apologies to Police) is ignored by everyone around me, be they even fellow pedestrians, two-wheelers, both motorized and non-motorized, cattle, automobiles (down to earth or fancy and expensive), three-wheelers, small goods carriers like mini flat-bed trucks, road monsters (aka buses), oil tankers, construction equipment ...

Justices of the Supreme Court of India think pedestrians have the fundamental right to walk in the space designated for them. Someone forgot to tell them, first, there are no such spaces and second, these are occupied even by police vehicles. So, to whom does a pedestrian complain? To God, that ever-deaf entity, that resides everywhere and nowhere, all at once?

In India, there is no dignity for pedestrians, never mind what the Supreme Court of India says.

Raghuram Ekambaram