Ten years after Parliament enacted the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, India is still working out how a rights-based framework should operate on the ground. On July 29, 2026, the Supreme Court was told that the final gazette notification on accessibility standards for the built environment was ready for approval, while rules for information and communication technology were still at the draft stage. The court has also pressed governments to fill statutory posts meant to enforce disability rights. The gap between legislation and lived experience remains an administrative problem that India has yet to solve.
The change in the legal framework has nevertheless been substantial. The 2016 Act gave effect to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which India ratified in 2007, and expanded the list of specified disabilities from seven to 21. More important is the principle embedded in the law. A person with disability is defined as someone with a long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairment which, in interaction with barriers, limits full participation in society. The familiar 40% threshold belongs to the separate category of “benchmark disability” used for certain entitlements. That distinction matters. Indian law has moved some distance from treating disability primarily as an individual medical condition.
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The Supreme Court has pushed that logic further. In Rajive Raturi v Union of India, it held accessibility to be integral to the rights to life, dignity and freedom of movement. It also found fault with Rule 15 of the 2017 Rules because standards presented as mandatory were, in several cases, merely recommendatory. The court called for a baseline of enforceable requirements, backed by consequences for non-compliance. By July this year, that exercise was still being completed.
Inclusion begins in the classroom
The classroom is an obvious place to test what a rights-based approach means. The RPwD Act requires recognised and government-funded educational institutions to work towards inclusive education. It specifically provides for teachers qualified in sign language, appropriate modes of communication for deaf students, reasonable accommodation and changes in teaching that allow children with disabilities to participate alongside others.
Indian Sign Language has acquired an institutional base as well. The Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre was established in 2015 and had trained more than 1,000 people through diploma and short-term programmes by December 2024. The National Education Policy calls for ISL to be standardised and for curriculum materials to be developed for students with hearing impairment.
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There is room to extend this effort beyond students who depend on sign language for communication. Primary schools could introduce hearing children to a limited number of commonly used signs without turning ISL into another examination subject. Such exposure would give children some ability to communicate with deaf classmates and make sign language less unfamiliar outside specialised schools.
The case for doing so goes beyond curriculum design. Most hearing children grow up with little direct knowledge of how deaf people communicate. That distance persists into adulthood and often leaves a deaf person addressing an interpreter or companion rather than the person standing in front of them. A small intervention at school could change that habit far earlier than an awareness campaign aimed at adults.
Accessibility is a design question
The same principle applies outside the classroom. India has changed its statutory vocabulary, and the Act itself uses the term “person with disability”. Yet better terminology cannot compensate for an unusable pavement, an inaccessible bus or a ramp built at a gradient that defeats its purpose. The law is unusually clear on this point: its definition of a “barrier” includes environmental, institutional, social and attitudinal factors.
This also helps resolve a question the disability debate sometimes muddles. Eligibility under the RPwD Act and good public design are different issues. The statute refers to long-term impairment. A person recovering from a fracture may therefore fall outside that definition. But a well-designed station, footpath or public building should still work for that person. The Act itself defines universal design as making products and environments usable by all people to the greatest extent possible. Older people, someone with a temporary injury and many others benefit from the same features that make a building accessible to a wheelchair user.
This is why accessibility standards cannot be reduced to a checklist attached to a government scheme. They have to enter building approvals, procurement, transport contracts, school design and the routine maintenance of public infrastructure. The Supreme Court’s insistence on enforceable standards is important because accessibility promised in a guideline has little value if nobody is accountable for applying it.
India has often invoked Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world as one family, in describing its public philosophy. The idea acquires policy meaning when a citizen can use a public facility without special pleading. Social inclusion begins with recognising the individual rather than treating access as an act of assistance or generosity.
Disability rights: Progress is real, and uneven
The Accessible India Campaign shows what sustained public investment can achieve. Government data published in December 2024 said accessibility features had been added to 1,748 government buildings. All 35 international airports and 55 of 69 domestic airports had accessibility features. The government classified 709 railway stations as fully accessible and another 4,068 as partially accessible.
Road transport presented a very different picture. Of 145,747 buses covered by the government’s figures, only 8,695, or 5.96%, were fully accessible; another 42,348 were partially accessible. The contrast is useful because it shows that a national campaign can produce markedly different outcomes across sectors. Airports are relatively concentrated systems. Buses operate through state undertakings, municipal networks, different vehicle fleets and dispersed infrastructure. Accessibility becomes harder when responsibility is fragmented.
Education presents a similar mixture of progress and unfinished work. Government figures based on UDISE+ data reported 833,703 of 1,168,292 government and government-aided schools as having barrier-free access, roughly 71%. The number is substantial, though the underlying data are older and should not be mistaken for a current measure of the quality or usability of those facilities. A ramp recorded in an administrative database says little about its gradient, maintenance or whether the route beyond it remains accessible.
India has therefore moved beyond the stage at which disability policy could be described mainly as welfare. The statute recognises rights, government programmes have financed large-scale improvements and the courts are demanding enforceable standards. The remaining work lies in institutions that rarely make headlines: a school that enables children to communicate, a bus system designed for independent travel, and a municipal authority that refuses to certify a building that excludes some of its users.
India has recognised accessibility in law. The measure of the next decade will be whether it becomes routine in public life.
Amrita Pankaj Satija is a LL.B (Hons) student at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University.