Despite decades of growth and the much-celebrated Smart City tag, Guwahati continues to treat pedestrians as second-class citizens. Across the busiest streets of Chandmari, GS Road or Zoo Road, footpaths have either disappeared or become inaccessible due to poor design, encroachment or sheer neglect. This failure is not a minor planning oversight but a structural exclusion of those who rely on walking as their primary means of commute.
According to the 2022 Ease of Living Index released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Guwahati performs poorly in urban mobility; around 40% of citizens walk as part of their daily commute, and yet less than 15% of the city’s roads have accessible and continuous footpaths.
Monsoon rains further worsen the crisis, where the walkways are waterlogged, with open drains and sidewalk disrepair, leaving walkers no choice but to share space with speeding vehicles on the streets.
It is evident that urban policy in the city disproportionately favours vehicles. Public discourse still equates infrastructure with buzzing flyovers, not footpaths. Budgetary priorities reflect this bias — while multi-crore flyover projects receive quick approvals and heavy funding, sidewalk development is left fragmented between the GMC, GMDA and the traffic police, with no unified pedestrian policy design or implementation roadmap.
Encroachments by hawkers and parked two-wheelers are common, and enforcement is largely absent. However, enforcement alone is not the issue. Guwahati has not meaningfully integrated universal design standards into public infrastructure.
Most footpaths lack a curb ramp for wheelchairs, covered drains during monsoon crises, and tactile tiles for the visually impaired. Women, the elderly and persons with disabilities are systematically excluded from safe and independent mobility measures.
Comparatively, other Indian cities offer better insights. Chennai’s ‘Complete Streets’ initiative, developed in partnership with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), redesigned over 100 km of roads to prioritise pedestrian mobility. Other Indian cities have adopted similar approaches.
For example, Coimbatore launched a ‘Model Roads’ pilot, revamping around 13.1 km across six key routes with broad footpaths and defined vendor zones.
Moreover, the ‘Car-Free Sundays’ initiative mobilised over 100,000 citizens, leading to the creation of dedicated Non-Motorised Transport Corridors and a formal Street Design and Management Policy.
In Indore, the Comprehensive Mobility Plan (CMP) indicated that 75% of streets lacked designated footpaths, prompting 2-meter-wide continuous sidewalks on high footfall corridors such as Ring Road and Race Course Road.
For Guwahati to move beyond fragmented fixes, pedestrian infrastructure must be embedded into the city’s institutional and civic backbone.
This may begin with establishing a dedicated Non-Motorised Transport (NMT) cell within the municipal system, staffed with engineers, urban planners and community liaisons to oversee all-round sidewalk development, from universal design compliance to encroachment audits.
Infrastructure, solely, will not sustain itself through design alone; maintenance must be decentralised and localised. Guwahati can do well to emulate Pune’s ward stewardship model, where specific streets and their footpaths are adopted by local residents and monitored through digital dashboards.
This can be formalised with partnerships between ward councillors, civil engineers and resident welfare groups, through which routine sidewalk upkeep can be tied directly to ward-level budgets, creating a more agile maintenance cycle.
The city must also explore creative financing mechanisms. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) frameworks can be mobilised by the government for private entities to fund footpath upgrades and maintenance, together with commercial corridors.
The public-private model can be drawn to run these drives in partnership with leading NGOs, keeping the approach more localised and rooted in grassroots understanding.
Moreover, in densely populated areas like Fancy Bazaar or the GS Road, the municipal administration can potentially look to pilot integrated micro-infrastructure projects targeting the rebuilding of footpaths with enhanced drainage, lighting and sanitation standards — a model approach adapted by Indore’s slum-networking project, where new storm drain and sewer lines were aligned with existing topography, leading to better delivery roads, drain covers, street lighting and footpaths across 183 settlement areas.
Similar studies can be deployed in Guwahati to tackle the ongoing struggle with micro-scaleable infrastructure upgrades, pushing the city lines towards a more inclusive approach to urban development.
Today, Guwahati stands at a crossroads. As it expands and modernises, it must not leave behind the very citizens who keep its streets moving. Pedestrian infrastructure has never been a luxury, but a right.
The models exist, and the stakes are evident. The real question now is — how long will a city keep building around lofty flyovers and fast-running vehicles, while sidelining the very people who move it forward, one step at a time?
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on the issue. The author is Research Assistant at the Pahle India Foundation.
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