Supreme Court Holds Safe Travel on National Highways a Fundamental Right Under Article 21
Summary
In a suo motu case titled In Re: Phalodi Accident vs.
●NHAI and Others, the Supreme Court held that safe travel on National Highways is an enforceable component of the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.
●Acting on two November 2025 accidents that killed 34 people, a bench of Justices J.K. Maheshwari and A.S. Chandurkar invoked Article 142 to issue binding nationwide directives to NHAI, MoRTH, and all State governments.
●The judgment imposes a positive obligation on the State — not merely a negative restraint — to maintain safe highway conditions, marking a significant expansion of Article 21's jurisprudential scope.
Core Arguments
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The transformation of Article 21 from a purely negative right into a source of positive State obligations — culminating in the Phalodi Accident judgment — creates an accountability gap: while the Court can declare the right, it lacks the institutional capacity to monitor compliance with hundreds of operationalised highway directives, making enforcement the structural weak point of this jurisprudential expansion.
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The invocation of Article 142 in governance-gap situations like road safety, while pragmatically effective, raises a genuine constitutional tension between judicial intervention and executive accountability — using extraordinary judicial powers as a substitute for legislative inaction risks normalising the Court as the de facto policy-maker for infrastructure governance.
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India's road safety crisis is not primarily a legal problem but an institutional one: the co-existence of NHAI, MoRTH, State PWDs, and local police creates a diffused accountability structure where no single authority owns the outcome, and the Court's directions to all simultaneously may actually dilute individual agency rather than sharpen it.
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The Phalodi Accident judgment's prohibition on new commercial structures within the Right of Way, while constitutionally grounded, directly conflicts with the livelihoods of thousands of highway-dependent informal economy workers — creating a rights conflict between Article 21 of commuters and Article 21 (read with Article 19(1)(g)) of displaced vendors that the judgment does not address.
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The Court's reliance on drone surveys and digital grievance portals (Rajmargyatra) as compliance mechanisms implicitly assumes institutional capacity in States that demonstrably lack it — a technology-only enforcement framework will produce asymmetric compliance, with better-resourced States showing formal compliance while accident-prone States remain unimproved.
Dimensional Angles
Legal
Article 21's positive-obligation dimension has been expanded through judicial interpretation, not constitutional amendment. The Phalodi Accident ruling adds 'safe passage' to a growing list that includes right to health (Paschim Banga, 1996), right to clean environment (M.C. Mehta cases), and right to livelihood (Olga Tellis, 1986). Article 142, invoked here, is an extraordinary and discretionary power — the Court has itself cautioned it cannot be used to bypass substantive law or violate the Constitution (Supreme Court Bar Association v. Union of India, 1998).
Governance
The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act 2019 already mandated road safety measures, establishment of a National Road Safety Board, and enhanced penalties. The persistence of 30% NH fatality share despite this legislation signals an implementation gap, not a legal vacuum — raising the question of whether further judicial direction adds accountability or merely adds compliance paperwork for an already-strained administrative machinery.
Political
The judgment reaches across both Union and State domains — NHAI is a Central body, while land-use enforcement on highway Right of Way involves State Revenue and Police departments. The Centre-State dimension of road safety compliance has been largely unaddressed, and a contempt proceeding against any State government for non-compliance would create significant political friction.
Economic
India recorded 1.68 lakh road accident deaths in 2022 (MoRTH Annual Report) — an economic loss estimated at 3-5% of GDP annually when medical costs, lost productivity, and emergency response are aggregated. The Phalodi directives, if implemented, have measurable economic upside; the cost of non-compliance is not merely human but macro-fiscal.
Value-Adds for Answers
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Data: India recorded approximately 1.68 lakh road accident deaths in 2022 according to MoRTH's Annual Road Accidents Report — equivalent to roughly 460 deaths per day. National Highways accounted for about 30% of these despite forming only 2% of road length.
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Comparison: The UK's Vision Zero framework (adopted 2019) reduced road fatalities on motorways by 28% in three years through mandatory CCTV-linked speed enforcement, real-time incident management, and strict ROW clearance — a comparable institutional architecture to what the Phalodi directives attempt to create in India.
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Quote: Supreme Court bench of Justices J.K. Maheshwari and A.S. Chandurkar, April 2026 — highways cannot be allowed to become 'corridors of peril' because of illegal parking, encroachments, and chronic administrative neglect.
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Recent: Control of National Highways (Land and Traffic) Act, 2002 — the Court cited this statute alongside the National Highways Act in framing the State's existing statutory duties. The judgment explicitly held that the Phalodi accidents were not 'mere accidents' but symptoms of a failure of duty under both statutes and Article 21.