I have never once walked to work safely.

This morning, while I was walking on the arterial road to work, a blue BMTC bus missed me by inches. Close enough that I felt the draft on my arm, one would assume my heart was in my mouth. No, it wasn’t. This is routine. A little ahead, near my office, a delivery partner on an electric Yulu squeezed between me and an idling auto. I did not flinch. Now my brain does the math: vehicle velocity, distance, and there, I dodge. Honestly, this is no longer commuting. This is a survival exercise I perform every morning.

Do we even build for people who walk?

Nearly a third of all urban workers in India walk to work, the highest share of any single mode. More people walk than drive. More people walk than take the metro. And the infrastructure budget for the most common way Indians move through their cities is effectively zero. We build highways and flyovers, and we should. But a basic, uninterrupted footpath? Not a priority.

There is a stretch of footpath on my route. One night, passing through, I stopped and looked at it. Cracked paver blocks, shifted and sinking. An open drain gaping in the middle, wide enough to swallow a person of any age. A heap of trash piled on one side. I paused briefly, buried my nose inside my t-shirt, jumped over the drain, and kept walking. ‘Kuch nahi badlega’, I murmured.

And I should be honest. I stopped griping about this a long time ago. I tread on the same road day after day and do not question it. I dodge traffic and call it routine. I became the apathy I am now writing about. We have become so hardwired to the absence of something so basic that we have stopped anticipating its existence. A tattered footpath can be fixed, but a population that no longer demands one is much harder to repair.

India lost over 1.70 lakh people to road accidents in 2024. In cities like Delhi and Mumbai, pedestrians account for over half of all traffic fatalities. These are not accidents. If people are forced to walk where vehicles move, this is predictable. And the part that distresses me more than the broken concrete is the tacit acceptance.

We managed to send a rover to the Moon’s south pole, yet building a footpath feels like squaring the circle.