On the occasion of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (21st May), a reflection on faith, dignity, and the long-overdue conversation about disability access in India's temples and sacred spaces.
There is a particular kind of exclusion that cuts deeper than most. It is not the exclusion of opportunity, of education, or of employment — though those too are real and urgent. It is the exclusion from belonging. From the community. From the ordinary human experience of standing, however one stands, before the sacred.
For millions of persons with disabilities across India, the temple — the mandir, the gurudwara, the dargah, the church, the vihara — is not merely a building. It is where the family gathers after a wedding, where one goes in grief, where a child is brought for the first time, and where a person seeks stillness in a noisy world. It is, in the deepest sense, home.
And yet, for a great many disabled devotees, the path to that home is blocked — by steep staircases, by narrow doorways, by floors that offer no guidance to a person who cannot see, by announcements that carry no meaning to a person who cannot hear, and, perhaps most painfully, by attitudes that treat the presence of a person with a disability as an inconvenience rather than a right.
This is not a peripheral concern. It is a central one. And it is past time to speak about it plainly.
What Accessibility Actually Means
The word "accessibility" is often narrowly understood to mean a ramp at the entrance. That understanding, while not wrong, is drastically incomplete.
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 — India's principal disability legislation — recognises 21 categories of disability. Each category brings with it a distinct set of barriers in the context of religious spaces.
A person with a locomotor disability may find that every approach to the sanctum requires climbing stairs for which no alternative exists. A person with visual impairment may find no tactile pathway, no Braille signage, no audio guidance — nothing to orient them in an unfamiliar or crowded space. A person who is deaf or hard of hearing receives no information from audio announcements and finds no visual emergency communication when it is needed. A person with autism or an intellectual disability may encounter the overwhelming sensory environment of a busy temple — the noise, the heat, the press of bodies — without any provision for a quieter hour or a simplified route.
These are not edge cases. They represent a substantial portion of India's population of disabled persons — a population estimated, conservatively, at over two and a half crore people, though many disability scholars argue the actual figure is considerably higher, given the structural undercounting of disability in official data.
True accessibility means that a person with any of these disabilities can enter a place of worship, move through it, perform worship, and leave — with dignity, without unsolicited assistance, and without experiencing exclusion at any stage. That is the standard. Everything else is a step towards it.
The Law Is Already Clear
One of the persistent myths in conversations about temple accessibility is that the law is ambiguous or that religious institutions occupy a space outside its reach. Neither is true.
The Constitution of India does not permit the exclusion of disabled persons from public religious life. Articles 14 and 15 guarantee equality and prohibit discrimination, including the structural discrimination created by inaccessible environments. Article 21, which protects the right to life and dignity, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to encompass spiritual participation, cultural belonging, and the right to community life. Article 25 guarantees freedom of religion to all citizens — a freedom that becomes empty if the infrastructure of religious life is inaccessible.
The RPwD Act, 2016, under Sections 40, 44, 45, and 46, imposes specific obligations to create barrier-free environments across public buildings — and temples, as spaces open to the public, fall squarely within that framework. The Harmonised Guidelines and Standards for Universal Accessibility in India, 2021, issued by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and incorporated into the RPwD Rules by the Amendment Rules of 2023, constitute the mandatory statutory standard. These are not aspirational suggestions. They are legal requirements.
The Supreme Court has said as much. In Rajive Raturi v. Union of India, the Court affirmed that accessibility is a fundamental human right and a prerequisite for the exercise of all other rights. In a landmark judgment delivered in November 2024, the Court went further and held that the framing of accessibility obligations as merely aspirational was itself inconsistent with the parent legislation. Using language that deserves to be quoted: "A ceiling without a floor is hardly a sturdy structure." The Court directed the framing of mandatory accessibility rules — a direction that applies across public institutions, including religious ones.
The Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities issued specific guidelines for making religious places accessible as far back as January 2019. High Courts in Kerala and other states have addressed the denial of temple access to wheelchair users, emphasising that reasonable accommodation cannot be refused merely because it requires administrative adaptation.
The law has spoken. The question is whether those responsible for administering India's temples and places of worship are listening.
Our Traditions Already Know This
It would be a mistake to frame accessibility as an imposition of external values upon religious tradition. The ethical foundations of India's major spiritual traditions already support inclusion, compassion, and the recognition of bodily diversity.
The Rigveda contains the account of the Ashvins restoring Queen Vishpala's mobility. The Mahabharata and Puranic literature are replete with figures whose bodies are described as diverse, impaired, or differently formed — without this diminishing their spiritual standing. Buddhist and Jain narratives, and the Bhakti traditions above all, argued repeatedly that access to the Divine could not be conditioned upon birth, social status, bodily conformity, or ritual gatekeeping.
The Bhakti saints were, in many respects, the original accessibility advocates. Their insistence that inner devotion superseded external circumstance — that the sacred was not the exclusive property of those whose bodies, caste, or status met prevailing standards — is precisely the tradition that ought to animate contemporary practice.
Excluding disabled devotees from temples does not honour tradition. It contradicts it.
The Dignity Question
Beyond the legal and textual arguments, there is a question of ordinary human dignity that ought to require no elaboration, yet apparently does.
In many temples across India, the informal practice for persons who cannot climb stairs is to be carried on someone's back, or in their arms, through crowds, through unfamiliar spaces, without prior arrangement or predictability. This is offered as a solution.
It is not a solution. For many persons with disabilities — particularly women, who may find such physical handling by strangers deeply uncomfortable — it is an experience of exposure and loss of bodily autonomy in a space that is meant to be peaceful and sacred. Worship should not require surrendering one's dignity at the entrance.
Motorised wheelchairs and three-wheelers — mobility devices that allow disabled persons to move independently — are frequently turned away from temple premises because they are too large, or that the terrain cannot accommodate them. The person who uses such a device is thereby told, in effect, that their mode of independent movement is less welcome than their presence in a state of dependence. That is not an accommodation. It is its opposite.
Heritage preservation concerns are real, and this article does not dismiss them. Ancient temples are architecturally sensitive. But non-destructive and reversible solutions exist — modular ramps, wooden overlays, rubberised surfaces, portable lifts, dedicated internal temple wheelchairs maintained according to ritual protocols, tactile indicators that do not damage historic floors. The choice is not between accessibility and heritage. It is between the will to find solutions and the inertia of not looking for them.
Beginning the Conversation
It is in this spirit that the Manifesto for Universal Accessibility in Temples and Places of Worship has been prepared — a document that brings together India's constitutional framework, its disability legislation, its judicial developments, its spiritual traditions, and practical proposals for physical, sensory, communication, and administrative accessibility.
The Manifesto is not a litigation document. It is not a confrontational one. It is a beginning — a structured articulation of what is already required by law and by conscience, addressed to those who have the power to act: temple trusts and Devasthanam Boards, endowment departments and conservation authorities, architects and administrators, state and central governments, and the judiciary.
Its proposals are concrete: non-destructive accessible entrances; accessible toilets; internal wheelchairs and priority queues; tactile flooring and Braille signage; visual display systems and sign language support at major temples; quiet darshan hours for those who need them; accessible online booking and grievance redressal; dedicated accessibility officers; mandatory access audits with publicly available reports; time-bound compliance plans; and a National Register of Accessible Places of Worship so that disabled persons and their families can plan a visit with information rather than uncertainty.
None of this is radical. Most of it is already law. What is missing is the will to implement it — and the acknowledgement, by those in positions of religious and civic authority, that this is a matter requiring urgent attention.
What Needs to Happen Now
There are concrete steps that governments, temple authorities, and civil society can take without waiting for a court order or a new policy notification.
Temple administrations can begin with a genuine accessibility audit — not a perfunctory one, but a thorough assessment conducted with the participation of persons with disabilities, consistent with the principle that no plan affecting disabled people shall be finalised without them.
While the CCPD’s 2019 “Guidelines for Making Religious Places Accessible” represented an important institutional acknowledgement that accessibility in places of worship is a legitimate rights issue, the guidelines remain limited in both scope and conceptual depth. In particular, the provisions dealing with worship spaces and access to rituals address the issue only at a broad and largely infrastructural level. They do not sufficiently engage with the far more complex realities that persons with disabilities routinely encounter in temples and religious institutions across India — including exclusionary ritual practices, restrictions on assistive devices, inaccessible darshan systems, sensory barriers, crowd management failures, stigma surrounding bodily difference, and the tension often created between constitutional accessibility obligations and claims of ritual purity or heritage preservation. In practice, these barriers frequently operate not merely as architectural inconveniences, but as mechanisms of social and spiritual exclusion.
The difficulty is therefore not simply the absence of ramps or accessible toilets. The deeper issue concerns whether persons with disabilities are recognised as equal participants in religious life itself. A framework capable of addressing this question cannot realistically be condensed into two brief guideline provisions. The issue requires a far more detailed, intersectional, disability-centred, and constitutionally grounded approach that takes the lived experiences of devotees with diverse disabilities across different religious contexts.
For this reason, the Manifesto for Universal Accessibility in Temples and Places of Worship may serve as a useful starting point for future reform and reconsideration of the existing framework. The manifesto attempts to move beyond a narrow understanding of accessibility by addressing questions of dignity, participation, ritual access, sensory accessibility, accountability mechanisms, heritage-sensitive retrofitting, administrative obligations, grievance redressal, and the harmonisation of constitutional morality with religious practice. Rather than treating the CCPD guidelines as a complete or final solution, they ought perhaps to be understood as a preliminary foundation that now requires substantial expansion and reworking through meaningful consultation with persons with disabilities, Disabled Persons’ Organisations, temple administrations, conservation experts, and constitutional scholars. Accessibility in places of worship is ultimately not a minor technical issue capable of resolution through a few isolated provisions; it is a broader question of equal citizenship, dignity, and belonging within India’s spiritual and public life.
Architects and conservation professionals can develop heritage-sensitive accessibility interventions — solutions that do not damage what is old while making it possible for everyone to enter.
And all of us, as devotees and as citizens, can begin to ask — consistently and without embarrassment — whether the places we call sacred are genuinely open to all.
A Closing Thought
A society that speaks of compassion, of equality, of the spiritual worth of every human being, must at some point answer a very simple question: Can a place truly call itself sacred if some people cannot enter it with dignity?
The answer to that question is not a legal one, though the law supports it. It is a moral one. It is a question of what kind of society India wishes to be, and what kind of spiritual culture it wishes to transmit to those who come after.
Every person who wishes to worship ought to be able to do so — without barriers, without humiliation, without having to negotiate their basic dignity at the gate.
That is not a special demand. It is the most ordinary one imaginable.
The Manifesto for Universal Accessibility in Temples and Places of Worship is attached. Read it. Share it. And wherever you have the capacity to act on it, please do.
