Who is actually paying for "free" parking, if not the driver?

A 77-year-old man is pushed to the ground and dies over a parking dispute in Noida. A visitor is killed over parking in a Vadodara colony. These are not freak events - they are what happens when a scarce resource is declared free and then left to be fought over informally.

The real question these deaths raise is bigger than parking: what does a society actually do when it calls something "free" that plainly isn't? Street parking looks free because no money changes hands when a car owner claims a strip of public road.

But the road, the footpath space it consumes and the pedestrian access it blocks all belonged to everyone before that claim was made. When one household parks two cars permanently outside its gate, it has not found a free resource - it has captured a public one, at the direct expense of the elderly walker who now steps into traffic, the child who has no safe footpath and the ambulance that cannot pass.

The cost has not disappeared because no price tag was attached to it. It has simply been shifted onto people with no way to object, until objection turns physical, as it tragically has. This is a pattern that recurs whenever a commons is declared open to all without a mechanism to allocate it fairly.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century England faced a structurally similar problem with its common lands - grazing pastures, woods and fields that villagers had used collectively for centuries under customary, unwritten rules.

When those rules broke down under population pressure and commercial farming, the land was formally enclosed and privatised through a wave of Parliamentary Acts, extinguishing the traditional access rights of smallholders almost overnight.

The enclosures are remembered, rightly, as a story of the powerful seizing what once belonged to the many. But the underlying diagnosis was not wrong: an unpriced, unmanaged commons does not stay equally shared. It drifts toward whoever is best positioned to claim it first and hold it longest.

The difference between English enclosure and Indian parking pricing is the difference that should guide policy today. Enclosure simply ended the commons and handed it to private owners, with no obligation to compensate those who lost access.

A permit-based, paid parking system does something structurally different: it makes the existing transfer visible, charges the party who benefits from it and can direct that revenue back toward the people currently bearing the cost - safer footpaths, better transit, reclaimed public space.

Pricing a commons is not, by itself, a betrayal of its public character. What matters is whether the money collected repairs the imbalance the free-for-all created or simply legitimises it under a new name. India's cities now have the chance the enclosures never offered: to price the commons without abandoning the people the commons was meant to serve.