The Right to Worship: Making Temples Accessible to Every Devotee

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.

The full Manifesto for Universal Accessibility in Temples and Places of Worship is attached to this post.

Click here to Access Manifesto

The Hidden Profit in Accessibility: Why Smart Builders Are Embracing the Curb Cut Effect

The 'Profit' of Progress: When one small ramp for a man becomes a giant leap for the delivery guy, the tourist, and the rest of the neighbourhood!

Construction shapes the cities where millions live, work and shop. Yet for many builders, features for people with disabilities seem like an extra burden – an unwelcome cost or a design headache. In reality, inclusive design pays off for everyone. The “curb cut effect” shows that when we build with disability in mind, all users benefit. In other words, ramps, lifts and wide doors aren’t just for a few – they make life easier for millions more. 

Designing this way is no fad; it’s a smart, long-term investment. India’s National Building Code (NBC) 2016 is actually built on these universal principles, making accessibility mandatory in every new building.

What Is the Curb Cut Effect?

The curb cut is that small ramp you see on a sidewalk corner. It was created so wheelchair users can easily move between the road and the pavement. But the moment it appeared, everybody started using it – parents pushing strollers, delivery workers with trolleys, travellers with suitcases, even kids on bicycles. This gave rise to the “curb cut effect”: a change intended for a minority (people with disabilities) unexpectedly helps a much larger group.

The curb cut effect reminds us that accessibility is a universal benefit. When we make even one small change – like adding a gentle ramp or an automatic door – it creates ripple effects. As one article puts it, “the curb cut effect” is where “accommodations and improvements made for a minority end up benefiting a much larger population in expected and unexpected ways”. Put simply: design with inclusion, and you make life easier for everyone. It’s not just a feel-good notion – it’s an everyday reality that even able-bodied people rely on every day (often without noticing).

For example, consider elevators. They were once installed primarily to help people who cannot climb stairs. Today, almost everyone uses elevators – parents with prams, the elderly, travellers with heavy bags, or simply tired employees. In fact, an elevator is only one of many curb-cut-style solutions. Automatic doors, audible traffic signals, Braille signage, touch-free dispensers – these all began for accessibility, but now assist many more users.

Universal Design Explained

This idea ties into universal design. Universal design means planning buildings and spaces to work for all people, regardless of age or ability. The NBC 2016 is based on universal design principles. It is the “Constitution” for India’s construction industry – mandatory for all buildings. Architects and engineers who apply universal design essentially build once and serve everyone. The same gentle slope that helps a wheelchair user will help a child with a tricycle; wide doors accommodate not just wheelchairs but also delivery carts and moving furniture. In short, universal design covers people of all life stages: families with infants and elders with walkers alike.

Universal design isn’t just about altruism. It’s about smart planning. A well-designed ramp or handrail might seem like a small item on the blueprint, but it transforms a step into a shared path. As one disability expert notes, “Design that works for everyone will work for you too – not only right now… but also when you are old”. It even matters in emergencies: features that aid evacuation (wider exits, smooth ramps) help everyone during a fire or earthquake. Good design also includes obvious things like non-slip floors (helping older people and movers alike).

In India’s booming cities, where footpaths are often uneven and crowded, the need is urgent. A lack of curb cuts, narrow lanes or blocked doorways can leave many people stranded. Making those paths smooth and ramped improves safety and flow for all pedestrians. Think of busy markets, railway stations or bus stops: removing a single barrier for one user type speeds up the line for everyone. Indeed, after installing ramps and tactile strips in metro stations or train platforms, passenger flow can improve dramatically – trains run on time, and fewer people miss their ride.

Real-World Examples

Builders may find these ideas abstract until they see them in practice. Across India, we find curb-cut effects at work. Consider some cases:

• Indian streets and footpaths: Cities like Chennai and Kolkata have been rebuilding sidewalks with wide pathways, ramps and shade. Initially driven by activists for wheelchair access, these upgrades now help countless others. Mothers pushing baby prams can move freely, delivery men roll carts easily, and senior citizens walk without stumbling over steps. Nearby shops report higher foot traffic (and even higher rents) once the pavements became accessible. In fact, it’s been observed that everyone – “parents pushing prams, commuters with wheeled bags… soon realised how much easier their lives had become”. An accessible footpath truly invites the community in.
• Public transport hubs: Railway stations and bus terminals that add ramps, lifts and tactile paving show the curb-cut effect clearly. For a wheelchair user, a ramp to the platform means independence – no porters required. For all passengers, clear signage and barrier-free lanes reduce confusion and crowding. Studies find that stations with universal design see faster passenger movement and fewer delays. For instance, when a metro added low-floor trains and ramped access, daily ridership climbed – families and the elderly could board as easily as anyone else. These changes often spur local business: better-access stations attract shops and hotels, boosting property values around them.
• Airports and big terminals: India’s major airports have adopted green, universal design. Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International and Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi airports boast ramps, wide corridors and accessible lounges. These features were installed for travellers with reduced mobility, but now everyone uses them. Parents glide through check-in with strollers, business travellers drag suitcases without bottlenecks, and cleaning crews push carts unimpeded. Not surprisingly, these airports have earned top green building awards and high accessibility ratings (Rajiv Gandhi Airport even gained ACI accessibility accreditation). The curb cuts here literally connect gates to runways for the disabled – and that seamless connection flows to all passengers, making travel smoother for thousands daily.
• Malls and workplaces: Commercial centres also reap huge rewards. Take Mumbai’s Phoenix MarketCity, which from day one included ramps to every floor, lowered counters and inclusive restrooms. Wheelchair users can reach every store, blind shoppers navigate via tactile flooring, and mothers with buggies roam freely. In the first year, the mall saw a double-digit rise in footfall and sales as word got out about the easier access. Likewise, Delhi’s Select Citywalk added ramps and automatic doors on popular sections; it found not only compliance with law, but also happier customers and tenants. In offices, the story is similar. Companies that ensure wheelchair access to lobbies and give adjustable-height desks to new parents end up with a more committed workforce. An office campus that installed lifts on every floor saw stair fatigue drop and overall productivity hold strong across diverse teams.

These examples share one trait: smart design attracts more users and revenue. Every time we’ve made a building more accessible, we’ve effectively opened it to an additional segment of society. Wheelchairs and baby buggies aside, these features help people carrying heavy loads, nerves on edge or just in a hurry – essentially, most users most of the time.

Legal Requirements: Comply and Thrive

Beyond good sense, law requires it. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPwD Act) explicitly mandates barrier-free design. Section 44 makes it clear that no new building plan can be approved unless it meets the accessibility standards set by government rules, and no occupancy certificate can be issued otherwise. In practice, this means that any architect or developer in India must include ramps, lifts, grab-rails, wide doors (typically 1.8 m minimum) and other features in their plans. All of this is also spelt out in the harmonised guidelines (2021) and NBC 2016.

Failing to comply is risky business. Governments can impose fines, issue stop-work orders, or demand costly retrofits if a building is not accessible. A non-accessible design could even stall your project’s approval. By contrast, building to code yields immediate benefits: your project sails through inspections, qualifies for green-building incentives, and earns public goodwill. Some state programs even offer tax rebates or priority lending for universally designed projects. In short, complying with the law is simply another way of future-proofing your asset. When accessibility rules are followed from the start, inspectors smile – and so do long-term tenants and customers.

The Business Case and Long-Term Wins

Accessibility is not just an obligation or a cost – it is a sound business decision. Consider the marketplace: persons with disabilities make up roughly 10–15% of our population, plus a large and growing number of seniors and families. Serving this community without extra effort is like unlocking a massive new customer base. When none are left out, everyone else benefits, and a building enjoys fuller occupancy at all ages.

Moreover, retrofitting an existing structure is typically far more expensive than including a ramp or lift in the first place. Some estimates suggest that doing the job twice can cost 20–30% more over a building’s life. So by adding a couple of percentage points to your initial budget (for example, a ramp might add 1–2% to construction cost), you skip the headache and expense of later rework. It’s literally cheaper to build it right at the outset.

Other payoffs include brand value and market appeal. An accessible building stands out as modern and caring. Investors, tenants and shoppers prefer spaces that welcome everyone – from wheelchair-using employees to grandparents with grandchildren. In fact, buildings with good access often command higher rents and attract premium clients. They also tend to age well; as trends change, inclusive buildings remain relevant. (Imagine your project 20 years from now: India’s seniors will be a significant demographic by then. Universal design now means you won’t have to renovate again to meet their needs.)

Benefits at a glance: - Wider market: Families, the elderly, visitors and more. Everyone spends money.\

• Higher returns: More footfall and satisfied tenants mean better revenues and rental values.
• Cost savings: One build now avoids costly retrofits later.
• Positive image: Compliance shows quality and earns green/CSR awards.
• Full compliance: No budget held up by legal rejections or fines.

As Jo Chopra McGowan (an expert cited above) notes bluntly, adding inclusive features is not an extravagance – “it’s the cost of building”. In other words, if you omit a ramp, you’re actually short-changing your structure’s value.

Start Today

If you’re planning a new project, ask yourself: Can everyone use this space? If not, add that missing ramp or widen that doorway now. Check your floor plans against the RPwD Act and NBC guidelines. Talk to your clients about accessibility – reassure them that it’s a long-term win, not a sunk cost.

Accessible design is like good insurance: you may never feel the need, but you’ll never regret having it. Imagine needing a ramp someday yourself – you’d want that little slope in place. Better to build it and not need it than need it and not have it.

In the end, building with universal design is simply smart business. It gets you law-abiding approvals, opens doors to more customers, and creates spaces that stand the test of time. 

Resources 

• https://www.changeincontent.com/the-curb-cut-effect-disability-design/
• https://www.archdaily.com/1005564/the-curb-cut-effect-how-accessible-architecture-is-benefiting-everybody
• https://idronline.org/article/diversity-inclusion/universal-design-in-architecture-benefits-everyone/
• https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/15939/1/the_rights_of_persons_with_disabilities_act%2C_2016.pdf

Employment as Applause: When Disability Inclusion Becomes Institutional Self-Congratulation

Introduction: Locating the Vantage Point

Conversations on disability and employment in India are rarely short of intent. They are, however, persistently short of consequence. Policy documents, corporate diversity statements, and institutional reports repeatedly affirm the importance of including persons with disabilities in the workforce, yet the lived reality of employment remains fragile, episodic, and conditional.

This article proceeds from a specific vantage point: empirical and legal work emerging from the Centre for Disability Studies (CDS) at NALSAR University of Law, including findings from the Finding Sizes for All (FSA) research. These findings do not claim to exhaust the field of disability and employment. Their value lies elsewhere. They reveal a recurring institutional orientation towards employment—one that treats inclusion as an achievement to be applauded, rather than a condition to be sustained.

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPwD Act), read together with India’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), establishes employment as a matter of enforceable equality. Yet, in practice, employment for persons with disabilities continues to operate as a conditional benefit—extended, withdrawn, and re-extended at the discretion of employers and administrators.

This article argues that disability inclusion in employment has increasingly become a site of institutional self-congratulation. Hiring is treated as proof of virtue; retention is rendered optional. The result is a system that celebrates entry while normalising exit.

The Legal Architecture: Employment Is Not Aspirational

It is necessary to begin with the legal baseline, because discussions on disability and employment often proceed as though inclusion were merely a matter of good practice, ethical commitment, or managerial benevolence.

The RPwD Act, 2016, marks a decisive shift in Indian disability law from a welfare-oriented framework to a rights-based regime grounded in equality and non-discrimination. Several features of the Act are directly relevant to employment.

• First, the Act explicitly prohibits discrimination in employment, including discrimination arising from the denial of reasonable accommodation. Discrimination is defined broadly, capturing not only intentional exclusion but also practices and conditions that have the effect of disadvantaging persons with disabilities. This aligns with the UNCRPD’s emphasis on substantive equality rather than formal parity.
• Second, reasonable accommodation is framed as a statutory obligation. It is not positioned as a discretionary managerial tool or a charitable adjustment. Failure to provide reasonable accommodation constitutes discrimination under the Act. The legal implication is clear: accommodation is a precondition for equality, not a concession.
• Third, the RPwD Act situates employment within a broader framework of dignity, autonomy, and participation in society. Employment is not an isolated policy objective. It is a gateway right. Failure in employment cascades into failures in social protection, independent living, and community participation.

The UNCRPD reinforces this architecture. Article 27 recognises the right of persons with disabilities to work, on an equal basis with others, in a labour market and work environment that is open, inclusive, and accessible. States Parties are obligated not merely to promote employment but to safeguard the conditions under which employment can be sustained, including through reasonable accommodation and protection against discrimination.

Taken together, these instruments establish a clear proposition: employment for persons with disabilities is not aspirational. It is justiciable.

What the Evidence Shows: Employment as an Episodic Event

Despite this legal clarity, findings emerging from CDS research, including the Finding Sizes for All study, reveal a persistent and troubling pattern.

Employment interventions for persons with disabilities overwhelmingly prioritise entry. Skill development programmes, certification initiatives, placement drives, and recruitment targets dominate both public and private sector approaches. Entry into employment is treated as the primary marker of success.

What remains weakly addressed is continuity.

Retention, career progression, workplace adaptation, and long-term security are rarely embedded into programme design or institutional accountability. Monitoring mechanisms often end shortly after placement. Enforcement mechanisms rarely extend beyond initial hiring.

When employment relationships break down—due to inaccessible work environments, withdrawal of accommodation, or hostile organisational cultures—the system offers little recourse beyond informal negotiation or exit.

From a legal standpoint, this represents a fundamental misreading of equality. The right to employment under the RPwD Act is not a right to be hired once. It is a right to participate in work on an equal basis over time.

The episodic nature of employment has direct implications for social protection. When employment collapses, responsibility for financial and care support shifts back to families, often without formal recognition or support. Social protection thus becomes privatised, gendered, and uneven.

This is not a failure of individual resilience. It is a structural design flaw.

Reasonable Accommodation: Law in Text, Discretion in Practice

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the gap between law and lived reality lies in the treatment of reasonable accommodation.

Legally, reasonable accommodation is mandatory. Operationally, it remains discretionary.

Findings from Finding Sizes for All indicate that accommodation is frequently negotiated on an individual basis, dependent on managerial goodwill, budgetary flexibility, or organisational culture. Accommodations may be provided temporarily, informally, or conditionally. They may be withdrawn when personnel change or when financial priorities shift.

This produces a legally perverse outcome: a statutory right whose enjoyment depends on institutional mood.

When accommodation is treated as an exception rather than infrastructure, the burden of adjustment shifts back onto the disabled worker. Individuals are expected to compensate for inaccessible systems through personal resilience, improvisation, or silence. The workplace itself remains unchanged.

From a doctrinal perspective, this undermines the very purpose of reasonable accommodation. Accommodation is not meant to reward deserving individuals. It is meant to internalise equality into organisational design.

Social Protection After Failure: A Backward Logic

Social protection frameworks for persons with disabilities in India continue to operate largely as post-failure compensation mechanisms. Pensions, allowances, and family-based support systems are activated after employment has failed or become impossible.

The CDS findings expose the limits of this model. When employment collapses due to lack of accommodation or a hostile work environment, social protection addresses income loss but not the structural exclusion that produced the loss.

This approach inverts the logic of rights-based inclusion. Instead of stabilising employment through proactive support, the system compensates individuals after exclusion has already occurred.

Legally and normatively, this is backwards.

Social protection ought to be attached to employment continuity. It should support accommodation costs, protect workers from attrition caused by structural design failures, and ensure predictability rather than churn.

When social protection is decoupled from employment stability, the State meets its formal obligations while outsourcing the consequences of failure to families and civil society.

Community Inclusion at Work: Beyond Cultural Framing

Community inclusion is often discussed in cultural terms—belonging, attitudes, and sensitivity. While these dimensions matter, they are insufficient from a legal standpoint.

In employment, community inclusion is about equal participation without penalty.

If disabled employees remain concentrated in limited roles, excluded from advancement, or evaluated against norms they were never accommodated to meet, inclusion has failed regardless of intent.

The RPwD Act does not require disabled workers to be inspirational. The UNCRPD does not require gratitude. What the law requires is equality in participation and opportunity.

Community inclusion that only survives during diversity days, leadership speeches, or pilot projects is not genuine inclusion. It is performance.

From Goodwill to Governance: Three Legal Thresholds

It is therefore necessary to move beyond recommendations framed as best practices and articulate clear legal thresholds.

• First, employment must be treated as a continuing right, not a placement outcome. Monitoring, enforcement, and accountability must extend beyond entry into employment.
• Second, reasonable accommodation must be operationalised as enforceable infrastructure. It cannot remain discretionary in practice while mandatory on paper.
• Third, social protection should be tied to employment continuity rather than compensating for its collapse. Protection must stabilise work, not merely respond to its failure.

These are not new ideas. They are already implicit in Indian law and international obligation. What is missing is institutional seriousness.

Conclusion: When Inclusion Flatters Institutions

Employment for persons with disabilities in India increasingly functions as a moral performance. Institutions congratulate themselves for hiring while leaving underlying structures intact. Inclusion becomes a certificate of good conduct rather than a condition of justice.

Employment, in such a system, is not offered as a right. It is offered as a reward—for the employer’s good behaviour.

That framing explains why so many inclusion efforts fail to endure.

And it brings us to the final reckoning.

If dignity at work survives only on being good, 

Then justice has failed—exactly where it should.

Prototype — Accessible to Whom? Legible to What?

When I first read this theme, I thought to myself, at last someone has asked the right two questions, though perhaps in reverse.

We often think of prototyping as a neutral, creative act—a space of optimism and experimentation. Yet, for many of us in the disability community, it is also the stage where inclusion quietly begins or silently ends.

And when Artificial Intelligence enters this space, another question arises: what does it mean for a prototype to be legible to a machine before it is accessible to a human?

My argument today is straightforward: AI-powered assistive technologies often make disabled people legible to machines, but not necessarily empowered as agents of design.

The challenge before us is to move from designing for to designing with, and ultimately to designing from disability.

Accessibility and Legibility

Accessibility, as Aimi Hamraie reminds us, is not a technical feature but a relationship—a continuous negotiation between bodies, spaces, and technologies.

It is not about adding a ramp at the end, but about asking why there was a staircase to begin with.

Legibility, on the other hand, concerns what systems can recognise, process, and render into data. Within Artificial Intelligence, what is not legible simply ceases to exist.

Now imagine a person whose speech, gait, or expression does not fit the model. The algorithm blinks and replies: “Pardon? You are not in my dataset.”

Speech-recognition tools mishear dysarthric voices; facial-recognition models misclassify disabled expressions as errors.

In such moments, accessibility collapses into machinic readability. One is included only if the code can comprehend them. The bureaucracy of bias, once paper-bound, now speaks in silicon.

The Bias Pipeline—What Goes In, Comes Out Biased

In one experiment, researchers submitted pairs of otherwise identical resumes to AI-powered screening tools. In one version, the candidate had a “Disability Leadership Award” or involvement in disability advocacy listed; in the other, that line was omitted. The AI system consistently ranked the non-disability version higher, asserting that the presence of disability credentials indicated “less leadership emphasis” or “focus diverted from core responsibilities.”Much Much Spectrum+1

This is discrimination by design. A qualified person with disability is judged unsuitable—even when their skills match or exceed the baseline—because the algorithm treated their disability as liability. Such distortions stem not from random error but from biased training data and value judgments encoded invisibly.

The Tokenism Trap

The bias in data is reinforced by bias in design. Disabled persons are often invited into the process only when the prototype is complete—summoned for validation rather than collaboration.

This is an audit theatre, a performance of inclusion without participation.

The United Kingdom’s National Disability Survey was struck down by its own High Court for precisely this reason: it claimed to be the largest listening exercise ever held, yet failed to involve disabled people meaningfully.

Even the European Union’s AI Act, though progressive, risks the same trap. It mandates accessibility for high-risk systems but leaves enforcement weak.

Most developers receive no formal training in accessibility. When disability appears, it is usually through the medical model—as something to be corrected, not as expertise to be centred.

Real-World Consequences

AI hiring systems rank curricula vitae lower if they contain disability-related words, even when qualifications are stronger.

Video-interview platforms misread the facial expressions of stroke survivors or autistic candidates.

Online proctoring software has flagged blind students as “cheating” for not looking at screens. During the pandemic, educational technology in India expanded rapidly, yet accessibility lagged behind.

Healthcare algorithms trained on narrow datasets make incorrect inferences about disability-related conditions.

Each of these failures flows from inaccessible prototyping practices.

Disability-Led AI Prototyping

If the problem lies in who defines legibility, the solution lies in who leads the prototype.

Disability-led design recognises accessibility as a form of knowledge. It asks not, “How do we fix you?” but “What can your experience teach the machine about the world?”

Google’s Project Euphonia trains AI to understand atypical speech. The effort is valuable, yet it raises questions of data ownership and labour—who benefits from making oneself legible to the machine?

By contrast, community-led mapping projects, where wheelchair users, blind travellers, and neurodivergent coders co-train AI systems, are slower but more authentic.

Here, accessibility becomes reciprocity: the machine learns to listen, not merely to predict.

As Sara Hendren writes, design is not a solution; it is an invitation.

When disability leads, that invitation becomes mutual—the technology adjusts to us, not the other way round.

• Speech Available at https://nileshsingit.neocities.org/Speeches/BitsSpech.html 

• Detail Paper at https://thebiaspipeline.nileshsingit.net/

Nilesh Singit

https://www.nileshsingit.in/