Urban governance in India has aimed to enable citizen engagement through many ways, such as decentralization of power through the constitution, partnerships with civil society and recently through digitization. These mechanisms have created spaces for citizen engagement that can inform decision making in urban management, including urban mobility.

Through a rapid assessment of mobility projects that have involved citizen participation, we find that they can be categorized based on typology, scales and extent. One of the learnings of the last two decades is that citizen engagement forms an integral element of sustainable urban mobility planning. It encourages people to own ideas and at the same time, lets the urban authorities incorporate local expertise and feedback into their work to achieve best possible outcomes. A participatory approach can enhance urban mobility and can help in ensuring cost-effective models in transportation planning.

Globally, the transportation sector shares approximately 24% of CO2 emissions, with road transportation being the major contributor. Therefore, in order to reduce these emissions, policy makers are shifting their focus on active transport across the world and emphasizing on improving infrastructure suitable for non-motorised transport. Non-Motorized Transport (NMT) is also known as active transport or human powered mode of transport. In this piece we look at the thrust around active mobility in India and efforts that can be given further impetus.

Our feedback is in the spirit of constructive feedback which can strengthen the bill. We believe that even though this is a state level bill for Karnataka, it has the potential to create a groundbreaking legislation for India and even other countries. Other states and countries could refer to this legislation to find ways in which they can provide equitable spaces to all users including users of active mobility modes. We wanted to bring to attention to the perspective of the common citizen in context of this creative legislation.