I watched a man in a wheelchair try to enter a government office in a mid-sized Indian city last year. There were seven steps and no ramp. A peon eventually helped carry the chair up, apologising the whole way, as though the missing ramp were a personal oversight rather than the default condition of nearly every public building in the country. This is what disability in India looks like on an ordinary Tuesday: the man needed a disability certificate, and he needed to climb those stairs to get the document that, on paper, entitles him to a barrier-free environment.
That contradiction is the story of disability in India: a strong law, a built environment that ignores it, and millions of people who spend their days negotiating a country that was never designed with them in mind.
Disability in India: a law that reads well on paper
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act, 2016 is, on its own text, one of the more progressive disability laws in the world, and the foundation of the legal framework for disability rights in India today. It replaced the 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act and expanded the list of recognised disabilities from 7 to 21, covering everything from locomotor and visual impairment to autism, specific learning disabilities, and multiple sclerosis. It defines a “benchmark disability” as 40 percent or more of a specified disability, certified by an authority, and it ties a set of concrete entitlements to that certificate.
Among those entitlements: 4 percent of vacancies in government establishments are reserved for persons with benchmark disabilities, split roughly a percentage point each across blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing impairment, locomotor disability, and a fourth category covering autism, intellectual disability and mental illness. Government-run and government-aided higher education institutions must reserve 5 percent of seats. The Act also obligates every government building, and eventually every service, to be made accessible under rules the Union government is meant to notify and enforce.
Those are real commitments. The gap is not in what the law promises. It is in what actually gets built, hired, and enforced.
The country of stairs
The Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities launched the Accessible India Campaign, or Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan, in December 2015, a year before the RPWD Act itself became law. A decade on, the campaign’s own reported numbers tell a story of partial, uneven progress. Around 1,630 government buildings, including roughly 1,030 central government buildings, have been given some accessibility features, out of a far larger universe of public buildings across the country. Accessibility audits have been carried out on close to 1,671 buildings against an original target of auditing 25 to 50 buildings in each of 50 cities, a target that itself covers only a fraction of India’s urban public infrastructure, before state and district-level buildings are even counted.
Public transport tells a starker story. Of nearly 1.46 lakh buses surveyed under the campaign, only 8,695 (under 6 percent) were found fully accessible, with another 29 percent partially accessible. That means well over half of India’s surveyed public buses remain effectively unusable for a wheelchair user or someone with a significant mobility impairment. Airports have fared better: all 35 international airports and most domestic ones now have ramps, accessible toilets and help desks. Indian Railways has placed wheelchairs at close to 5,868 stations and built ramps at around 2,586, with Braille signage at a much smaller subset of roughly 1,474 stations. These are genuine improvements. They are also a reminder of how far the remaining distance still is, station by station, city by city.
A ramp at the airport does not help someone who cannot get to the bus stop, and a bus stop with a low floor does not help if the road leading to it has no curb cut.
Accessibility only functions as a chain. A single broken link, a missing curb cut, a step at the entrance, a lift that is switched off to save electricity, can undo every accessible feature that comes after it. India has built accessible islands inside an inaccessible country, and for the person who has to travel from home to hospital to office in a single day, an island is not enough.
Numbers that undercount the problem
According to Census 2011, India had 2.68 crore persons with disabilities (26.8 million people, or 2.21 percent of the population). Disability researchers have long argued this figure is an undercount, since Census enumeration relies on self-reporting by household members using a short list of categories, a method known to miss psychosocial disabilities, mild impairments and conditions carrying social stigma. Global disability prevalence estimates from the World Health Organization run considerably higher than India’s Census figure, which is one reason disability rights groups have pushed for the 2021 Census, repeatedly delayed, to use a more rigorous, internationally aligned methodology when it is eventually conducted.
What the 2011 data does capture clearly is the skew: 69 percent of India’s disabled population lives in rural areas, where accessible infrastructure, assistive devices and specialised medical care are even scarcer than in cities. A person with a disability in a village is contending with the same law and the same missing ramps, with far fewer resources to work around them, and often with the added burden documented in India’s out-of-pocket health spending, since assistive devices and specialist visits rarely come cheap or close by.
The employment wall
Census 2011 found that roughly a third of persons with disabilities were working, with labour force participation estimated at about 36 percent against more than 55 percent for the general population. The gap widens sharply by gender: 47 percent of disabled men were employed against 23 percent of disabled women, meaning disabled women in India face a compounding of gender and disability exclusion that shows up starkly in the data.
Formal employment is even thinner. The National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) has estimated that persons with disabilities make up under 1 percent of India’s organised private sector workforce, and that most disabled Indians who do work are in agriculture or informal, insecure jobs without income security or a growth path. On the government side, RPWD’s 4 percent job reservation exists on paper, but implementation reports have repeatedly flagged departments that classify posts as “not identified” for disabled candidates, or that quietly carry forward unfilled disability quota vacancies year after year rather than actively recruiting against them.
A reservation that is not actively filled is not really a reservation. It is a number in a policy document, the same pattern this publication has traced in how India’s right-to-service laws go unenforced two decades on: a strong statute, a weak compliance mechanism, and no one whose job it is to close the gap.
Education’s gate closes early
The exclusion begins long before the job market. Census 2011 found that 28 percent of children with disabilities aged 6 to 13 were out of school entirely, and the figure rose to 44 percent for children with more than one disability, and above a third for children with mental or speech disabilities. Literacy among India’s disabled population stood at 54.5 percent, against roughly 74 percent nationally, with a wide gender split: 62.4 percent among disabled men, 44.6 percent among disabled women. Even among disabled Indians who do complete some schooling, only 59 percent finish Class X, compared with 67 percent of the general population.
RPWD’s 5 percent higher-education reservation cannot repair a pipeline that has already narrowed this much by age 13. A child who never reaches a classroom with a ramp, a Braille textbook, or a teacher trained in inclusive pedagogy will not be sitting for a university entrance exam a decade later.
What accessibility actually requires
Accessibility is often reduced, in policy documents and in public conversation, to a ramp at the entrance. The lived reality of disabled Indians I have spoken with points to a longer, connected chain of needs:
- Step-free paths from home to the nearest road, not just from the road to a building’s front door
- Low-floor, wheelchair-accessible public buses on ordinary routes, not just flagship corridors
- Sign language interpretation and captioning as standard practice in government offices and hospitals, not an occasional courtesy
- Affordable assistive devices (wheelchairs, hearing aids, canes) distributed and maintained, not handed out once at a camp and forgotten
- Teachers and employers trained to include, rather than merely to comply with a quota on paper
None of these individually costs as much as a flyover or a metro line. Together, sustained over years, they cost less than the economic loss of keeping a tenth of the workforce underemployed.
What it would take
None of this is a case against the RPWD Act or the Accessible India Campaign. Ramps at 1,630 buildings, wheelchairs at nearly 6,000 railway stations, and accessible features at every international airport are not nothing: they are evidence that the state can move when it commits resources and a deadline. The problem is scale and follow-through: audits that cover a few dozen buildings per city while millions of structures remain unassessed, a bus fleet that is over 90 percent unusable for wheelchair users a decade after the campaign launched, and a 4 percent job quota that departments treat as aspirational rather than mandatory.
Closing that gap means treating accessibility audits as a condition for a building’s occupancy certificate, not an optional add-on years after construction. It means tying government funding for public transport fleets to accessible-vehicle targets, with penalties for missing them. It means an ombudsman with real power to act when departments leave disability quota vacancies unfilled year after year, rather than a right that exists only on the pages of a helpline complaint.
The man I watched being carried up those seven steps did not need sympathy from the peon helping him. He needed a ramp that should have been built the day the office was. Until India stops treating accessibility as an afterthought bolted onto finished buildings, the RPWD Act will keep reading better than the country it is supposed to describe.