From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

On August 20, Cajetan Denis Pires, a 64-year-old amputee, boarded the Divyangjan coach of a Mumbai local train. When Pires allegedly asked an able-bodied man occupying the coach to vacate the seat, an argument followed. As per eyewitness accounts, Pires was pushed out of the moving train between Mahim and Bandra. He would later die from his injuries.

Four days after Pires’ death, a 14-year-old Deaf girl with learning disabilities was allegedly raped by a 40-year-old man in Madhya Pradesh’s Singrauli district. Police arrested the accused and registered offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, POCSO Act, SC/ST Act and Section 92 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act.

These cases are not outliers, and for many persons with disabilities, even seeking justice presents another barrier. The Supreme Court Social Justice Committee reported in 2022 that no court in the country had a sign-language interpreter. Similarly, a Human Rights Watch study of sexual violence against women and girls with disabilities found that in 15 of 17 cases examined, police or the courts did not provide legally required accommodations.

India’s only disability legislation, RPwD Act, 2016 is, by design, an umbrella legislation for India’s disabled. It deals with everything from education and employment to accessibility, social security, certification, guardianship to even the powers of the Chief Commissioner. Somewhere towards the end of this vast statute is Section 92, “Punishment for offences of atrocities”. Section 7 separately promises protection from abuse, violence and exploitation. Nearly a decade after these provisions were enforced, there remains a gap in disability-centric anti-atrocities regime. Data on FIRs registered under these provisions are still not maintained centrally.

And that is where it is interesting to study the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. The Act recognises that an atrocity requires an entire criminal-justice architecture around it. It contains dedicated offences, punishment for public servants who wilfully neglect their statutory duties, Special and Exclusive Special Courts, Special Public Prosecutors, preventive obligations and, importantly, an entire chapter setting out the rights of victims and witnesses. The law aims for both punishment and prevention of atrocities, besides providing relief and rehabilitation to victims.

The RPwD Act does contain Special Courts and Special Public Prosecutors, and Section 92 is significant. However, a few penal provisions grafted onto a much larger civil-rights statute are not equivalent to a specialised framework that tells police how to register such crimes, investigators how to recognise disability-related vulnerability, prosecutors how to pursue them, courts how to accommodate victims and witnesses, and governments what support must follow a crime.

If there is one new framework needed to secure PwD’s safety, it is the Persons with Disabilities (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. On the surface, violence against PwDs may seem more motivated by easy exploitability, rather than pure hatred. A wheelchair user may be unable to physically escape an attacker. A Deaf woman may be deliberately targeted because an offender believes she will find it difficult to report what happened. A person with an intellectual disability may be manipulated or disbelieved.

But there’s a need to look deeper, especially in a country like India where ideas of karma have long been used to justify social hierarchies, from caste-based exploitation to the belief that disability reflects lesser merit from a past life. Ultimately, exploitation, based on caste, gender or disability, operates on a common logic: superiority.

This karmic belief drives occasional performative charity towards PwDs as well. Sins are assumed to be washed away through minor acts of charity. Again, karmic belief stops this performative charity from translating into actual rights-based empowerment. A disability atrocities law therefore cannot simply copy the concept of a hate crime. It must recognise targeting, exploitation of impairment, abuse of dependency and interference with a person’s means of communication or mobility as distinctive forms of aggravated wrongdoing.

Critics might question whether every theft, assault or murder in which the victim happens to be disabled automatically becomes a disability atrocity. However my counter question to them would be: Was the victim targeted because of disability? Was their impairment, dependence or inability to communicate or escape deliberately exploited? Did the accused interfere with an assistive device or support person? Was the offender in a position of care, authority or control? Those are circumstances in which disability is not incidental to the crime; it is part of how the crime became possible.

Indian law has routinely evolved through specialised legislation: just as the IT Act has been supplemented by the Aadhaar, DPDP and Telecommunications Acts. It is time we stop looking at the RPwD Act as the final word on disability-related violence, and work towards a stronger legislation that prevents atrocities targeted at PwDs.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures key updates from August 14 to August 27, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Exclusion of 12 Categories of Disability in Census 2027: The Census 2027 disability questionnaire has drawn concern from rights groups for listing 9 broad categories, despite the RPwD Act, 2016 recognising 21 categories. They argue this could leave autism, specific learning disabilities, and multiple disabilities without visibility in official data, affecting needs assessment and planning. A Helping Hands assessment found many persons with disabilities (PwD) in Kadinamkulam outside social security. With self-enumeration underway, these findings show it is highly unlikely for the Census outcome to inform disability-inclusive policy effectively.

   

2. Parliamentary Panel flags serious gaps in accessible infrastructure in schools: A parliamentary panel’s report on affordability and quality education flagged that more than half the schools in the country lack facilities accessible to children with disabilities (CwD). The report highlights underutilisation of funds released under the Samagra Shiksha scheme, with only Rs 80.50 lakh used out of a budgetary grant Rs 962 lakh for special educators in the elementary section. The report also highlights underutilisation of funds in constructing accessible toilets and ramps with handrails in schools.

3. Odisha Seeks Stronger Safeguards for Property Rights of Persons with Disabilities: The Odisha Social Security and Empowerment of PwDs (SSEPD) Department has urged the Revenue Department to frame guidelines protecting land and property rights, citing fraud, coercion, unlawful occupation and denial of inheritance to PwDs. Proposed measures include stricter scrutiny of suspicious transfers, fast-track inquiries into encroachment, legally voiding fraudulent deals, and swift intervention by officials.

4. Expanding Access to Surgical Care for Persons with Disabilities in Uttar Pradesh: UP is providing financial assistance of up to ₹6 lakh for surgical procedures for PwD from low-income households. The scheme covers cochlear implants, reconstructive surgeries and orthopaedic interventions, subject to an annual income ceiling of ₹60,000. Prima facie, this income ceiling appears too low to be eligible for aid, given that even an annual income below Rs 1.61 lakh per adult puts a person in the bottom 40% of the society. The income ceiling would exclude many PwD in genuine need of aid and surgical care.

5. State Commissionerate directs review of assistance contingent on 100% disability: The Rajasthan State Commissionerate for Persons with Disabilities has directed the government to review guidelines that currently restrict an additional monthly aid of ₹1,000 strictly to individuals with 100% disability. The restriction of this additional aid to only people with 100 % disability was brought to light by Divyang Adhikar Mahasangh. They argued that those with severe disabilities but in a slightly lesser percentage, and dependent on caregivers for daily activities are unfairly excluded.

   

6. Rajnandgaon pilots disability-inclusive rural employment: Rajnandgaon district in Chhattisgarh has introduced disability-friendly productivity norms under the Viksit Bharat G-RAM-G scheme, tailoring work to individual capabilities. So far, 85 persons with disabilities have been trained and appointed as site supervisors, overseeing worksites, verifying attendance, maintaining records and monitoring quality. The initiative seeks to shift persons with disabilities from welfare recipients to active participants in rural development, while promoting livelihood opportunities, dignity and socioeconomic security.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. What does Swaraj mean to India’s Disabled Community?: Reflections on The Leaflet’s Independence Day Special Issue

2. Patna High Court: Disabled offspring can get pension during parent’s lifetime

3. Telangana: Over 42K Schools To Roll Out Disability Screening, Green Ratings

4. Visually-disabled students call off week-long protest in Doon after key demands accepted

5. ‘Happy birthday wheelchair’: Disabled New Jersey woman shocked seeing hurtful message on cake; restaurant says it was a reference for where the cake was to be served

6. Zion Becomes First National Park to Get All-Terrain Wheelchair for Public Use

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Kaustubh Dighe, along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi⁩ and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Twice a month, Eshana Anand, a tech media professional, needs to go to the hospital for blood transfusions. In addition, she ends up paying for blood filters, tests, iron-chelation medication and other medical consumables. The cost of living with Thalassaemia for her is Rs. 40,000 every month. This expenditure is a “tax” that is earmarked every month just to stay healthy enough to work.

As for me, basic functions such as bathing or dressing are insurmountable without my attendants. I need an accessible vehicle with a ramp because I cannot simply assume that the public transport available to everybody else will be accessible to me. These are not lifestyle choices. They are the “tax” I pay to live an independent and dignified life.

A Deaf person may need to pay a sign-language interpreter to communicate with a doctor, visit a bank or navigate another essential service. And thus they pay a “tax” to communicate with the outside world. A blind person may need screen-reading technology, Braille equipment or other assistive devices. That’s the “tax” they pay to access information that a sighted person receives for free.

Over the last month, millions of Indians have been speaking to their chartered accountants, collecting Form 16s and figuring out which deductions they can claim while filing their income-tax returns. For many people with disabilities, one deduction that once mattered is conspicuous by its absence under the new tax regime.

Under Sections 80U and 80DD of the Income Tax Act, deductions of ₹75,000 and ₹1.25 lakh are available depending on the severity of disability—either to disabled taxpayers themselves or to taxpayers supporting disabled dependents. But these deductions are available only under the old tax regime. They disappeared for those opting for the new tax regime introduced in 2020.

The government's own response in Parliament this month is revealing. Asked specifically about tax exemptions and deductions available to persons with disabilities under the new regime, it listed the exemption of Armed Forces Disability Pension from Taxation without having much else to add.

The old deduction was hardly generous. Yet, it acknowledged that two individuals earning the same income may not have the same disposable income if one of them has a disability.

The real question for policymakers is to consider what it costs a PwD to live a life as equitably as everybody else. The ₹75,000 and ₹1.25 lakh deductions were never enough to compensate for that difference. However, it was an acknowledgement that it costs more to live with a disability.

Many assistive devices continue to attract 5% GST. This includes wheelchairs, Braille devices, mobility aids and several technologies used by blind and disabled people.

Calling this a “concessional” GST rate misses the principle involved. Taxing a wheelchair is effectively taxing somebody for walking. Taxing technology that enables a blind person to access information is taxing them for seeing. Taxing an assistive communication device is taxing someone for communicating.

Assistive devices should therefore be zero-rated, rather than merely exempt, so manufacturers can claim input-tax credit without ultimately embedding those taxes in the price paid by disabled consumers.

We are not expecting a consolation amount for our disability. We are just asking the world to understand the costs it places on people like me to inhabit it.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures key disability-related updates from July 31 to August 13, 2026, including highlights from Parliament’s Monsoon Session, held from July 20 to August 13, 2026.

Parliament Question Tracker

Here’s a look at the key disability-related highlights from both Houses:

Lok Sabha

1. How well-supported are Children with Disability (CwD) in schools? - The government’s response claims steady increase in the enrollment of CwDs over the past three years, citing the UDISE+ initiative, but does not substantiate this claim with data. The government shared a yearly financial assistance of Rs 3,500 per CwD, for utilisation in identification and assessment camps, aids and assistive devices, transportation, escort and scribe allowance. However, it did not specifically address the query on providing free transport facility for CwD.

2. What are we doing to ensure continued financial assistance for patients with rare diseases? - The response does not yield disease- or State/UT-wise data on patients who have exhausted one-time rare-disease financial assistance, nor indicate any assessment of their need for continued support. While a new government crowdfunding portal has been launched for high-cost rare diseases, its distinct value over existing private platforms remains unclear. Some of the welcome measures include import tax exemptions, a NITI Aayog committee to fast-track domestic drug manufacturing, and funding for indigenous therapies.

   

3. How does the government determine assistance for aids and appliances? - The government shared the assistance structure under the Assistance to Disabled Persons for Purchase/Fitting of Aids and Appliances (ADIP) scheme, but did not disclose the operational criteria for fixing ADIP assistance rates across income brackets. While income-based assistance is welcome, a graded framework should also account for inflation, evolving assistive-device and treatment costs, and other substantial household expenses. The response does not indicate whether these factors inform assistance ceilings or whether beneficiaries’ living conditions are tracked beyond ARJUN Portal data.

Rajya Sabha

1. Hearing aids are GST Exempt: Why not cochlear implants? - The Government’s response confirms that hearing aids are GST-exempt and cochlear implants continue to attract 5%. In 2018, the GST Council considered and rejected a proposal to exempt cochlear implants, citing concerns around input taxes and domestic manufacturing. What would actually benefit PwDs, is a zero rated GST on assistive technologies that would enable them to not pay GST while also enabling manufacturers to recover input taxes, keeping the purchasing price sustainable.

   

2. India’s flagship disability rehabilitation scheme: What impact has it made? - As per the Government’s response. Andhra Pradesh received the highest DDRS funding in 2025–26, at ₹27.78 crore, supporting 5,493 beneficiaries through 55 NGOs. In contrast, no funds or beneficiaries were reported in 9 States and Union Territories. The state-wise variation raises questions about the reach and awareness of rehabilitation services and the factors shaping access to DDRS support across India.

3. What's the government's roadmap for strengthening livelihoods of PwDs? - The PM Vishwakarma and OSOP scheme primarily focus on imparting Basic Training Skills. However, the government’s response does not specify these skills or provide an answer on the structural details of the scheme including design-modernisation toolkits, and tailored advanced skill-upgradation modules for artisans with disability under the scheme. Additionally, Basic Skill Training is insufficient for PwDs to have sustained livelihood in a competitive and evolving market.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. ‘Compensation must cover a lifetime of suffering’: Supreme Court doubles compensation to Rs 83 lakh for child left disabled in crash, says ‘entire future has been taken away’

2. Disabled students protest poor facilities at Jaipur govt school; education dept forms panel

3. Disability Budget Analysis: Why Total Spending Is Not Enough

4. Indian Railways allows PwDs with UDID cards to travel on local, passenger trains

5. NCDRC finds 75% disability, man’s acid attack compensation raised to Rs 17 lakh

   ---

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Kaustubh Dighe, along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi, Sanskriti Bhatia⁩ and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

For the longest time in school, I refused to use a scribe. “It is my hands that think,” I told my mother and teachers, even though my handwriting was barely legible, sometimes even to me. Teachers would call me up mid-marking to decipher my own answer sheet, a second examination of sorts.

By Class IX, my mother had had enough. She argued I could not travel to an anonymous board examiner and expect them to sit through my recitation, and I surrendered. My relief was short-lived. One scribe could not spell to save her life. In mathematics, I solved questions on rough sheets and dictated the answers across. Finding a scribe was its own ordeal, one my mother solved with an informal incentive scheme of burgers and small gifts for willing juniors.

Board exams added bureaucracy. Permission for a scribe and extra time had to be sought in advance, the guidelines loosely defined. My mother once travelled to the CBSE headquarters herself to secure approval. We were still worried whether the examination centre would be accessible.

Students with disabilities continue to face these absurdities after all these years. Universities may require them to secure permission to use a scribe or receive compensatory time at the beginning of every semester—or sometimes before every examination. They must then locate a scribe, usually a junior student willing to spend examination season writing somebody else’s paper.

Competitive examinations take these complexities a notch up. Examination bodies now maintain official rosters of scribes to counter candidates colluding with scribes to cheat. How does a blind candidate know whether an unfamiliar scribe is writing exactly what is being dictated? How does someone establish, within minutes, the rhythm and trust necessary to complete a high-pressure examination?

Subject familiarity is essential. Law scribes should recognise Latin expressions, while mathematics scribes must understand symbols and equations and accurately capture the candidate’s responses without relying on assumptions.

The Nandan Nilekani task force on examination reform, formed in the wake of the Gen Z protests, has a real opportunity here. India can digitise an inaccessible system, or it can redesign one.

Every digital examination platform should meet India’s recognised accessibility standards. Speech-to-text software, accessible keyboards and other assistive tools could reduce our dependence on scribes altogether, with CCTV addressing collusion concerns instead of scribe rosters. I dictated this entire piece using Wispr Flow: imperfect, but efficient enough to make me faster.

Identity verification needs accessible alternatives too. Fingerprint systems exclude candidates who cannot provide usable prints. Facial or video verification can fail those with limited facial movement, speech disabilities or restricted motor control.

The committee should also end the ritual of repeatedly proving the same disability. A candidate’s certificate and approved accommodations, whether a scribe, extra time or assistive technology, could be recorded once and carried forward across examinations. Entitlement should replace recurring permission.

A few days ago, an Instagram Reel from a national protest showed a young disabled man explaining why being there mattered to him. Sadly, he said something devastating: “Main kisi ke kaam nahi aaya, aaj main kaam mein aaya hoon.” He said that he had never been useful to anyone before, but that day, he finally was.

Every inaccessible examination, every unaccommodative classroom, every repeated permission letter tells a disabled child that this system was not built for them.

If India does aspire to become a developed country anytime soon, it needs an education system that makes disabled students capable of contributing to it. That is what should make a disabled child feel useful, long before any protest does.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures the key updates from July 17 to July 30, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Centre proposes mandatory digital accessibility rules: The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has released the draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Amendment) Rules, 2026, following the Supreme Court’s judgement in Rajive Raturi v. Union of India, mandating accessibility standards for websites, apps, software and ICT-enabled public services. Entities with turnover above Rs 500 crore must comply within a year and others within 18 months, and every covered entity must publish an Accessibility Conformance Report; stakeholders have 30 days to submit objections.

2. Supreme Court presses Centre on vacant Chief Commissioner post, sets four-week deadline for state appointments: A Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Viswanathan directed the Centre to appoint a full-time Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities along with two assisting Commissioners within four weeks, noting the post has functioned on additional charge since 2019. Eleven states and Union Territories, including Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Karnataka, were similarly directed to appoint State Commissioners under Section 79 of the RPWD Act within the same period, with both Central and state authorities required to file compliance affidavits.

3. UDISE data shows CWSN enrolment stagnant, an estimated 78% remain out of school: The UDISE 2025-26 report records 21.66 lakh Children With Special Needs (CWSN) enrolled in schools, a number that has stayed largely flat over eight years. Using NFHS-5 disability data and government population projections in the absence of updated Census figures, The Hindu estimates the actual number of CWSN in the country at 92.3-98.8 lakh, meaning only about 22% are enrolled in schools. The data also shows enrolment shrinking more sharply for CWSN than for children overall as they move up school stages, and a persistent gender gap, with only 43 of every 100 CWSN enrolled being girls.

   

4. Disability compounds agrarian crisis in Vidarbha: A PARI feature profiles farmers with disabilities in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district, where accidents during extreme weather events, from electrocution while salvaging flooded crops to pesticide poisoning, have left several with permanent impairments and sharply higher labour costs. Sixty per cent of Maharashtra’s disabled population still lacks the Unique Disability ID (UDID) card needed to access welfare benefits, and no state scheme appears to account specifically for farmers with disabilities.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Parliamentary panel seeks compliance data on disability quota in government jobs

2. Supreme Court Asks Union To Consider Rail Fare Concessions, Emergency Quota For Acid Attack Survivors

3. Is ‘Best Effort’ Enough? A Loophole in India’s OTT Accessibility Rules

4. NMC shifts MBBS admission assessment for PwBD candidates to functional ability, mandates Enabling Units in medical colleges

5. Missing Lifts And Escalators At Mumbai’s Railway Subways Leave Elderly And Disabled Commuters Struggling

6. From Cyber to Cinema: Professor’s Debut Film Tackles Disability and Belonging

7. Women with disabilities flag compounding barriers in Supreme Court's three-year practice rule review

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi, along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

July is celebrated as Disability Pride Month. An idea I have always been in conflict with.

Why should I be proud that I am disabled? My disability prevents me from playing football like Lionel Messi. It increases my cost of survival through attendant bills, accessible transport and assistive technology. Even stepping out for coffee becomes an investigation: Does the café have a step at the entrance?

Disability is not merely an identity I carry. It creates real limitations, expenses and dependence, but above all, it attracts stigma. Yet we are often conditioned to recognise stigma only when it appears as violence, exclusion or overt discrimination. At a recent conference, UNICEF argued that some of its most pervasive forms are far subtler: lowered expectations, silence and overprotection, especially when they are presented as kindness.

Lowered expectations may feel supportive. In reality, they deny disabled people honest feedback, ambition and the opportunity to discover what they are genuinely good at.

When I was a child, my mother took me for piano lessons. I could play only with one finger and was, by any objective assessment, terrible. Yet my teacher kept encouraging me, perhaps because telling a disabled child that he was bad at something felt cruel.

Eventually, reason dawned on me. I did not need applause for being a one-fingered piano player. What I needed was to find spaces where I could compete on equal terms.

Then there is silence.

In many Indian families, disability continues to be hidden from neighbours, relatives and sometimes even prospective spouses. It remains entangled with the belief that disability is punishment for bad karma; something shameful that must remain within the family’s four walls.

Silence does more to erase, than to protect persons with disabilities. Children remain outside schools, adults outside employment and entire families outside public life.

Perhaps the most deceptive manifestation of stigma is overprotection.

In Punjab, visually impaired students from Classes IX to XII have reportedly been placed under a reduced, question-bank-based syllabus instead of being taught and examined on the complete curriculum. The policy may have been framed as accommodation, but effectively presumes how much a blind child is capable of learning.

We saw the same instinct in the Reserve Bank of India’s discussion paper proposing an additional factor of authentication for transactions above ₹50,000 by persons with disabilities and people aged over 70.

Protection without autonomy is simply control dressed up as concern.

Disability Pride, therefore, should not require us to pretend that disability causes no pain, dependence or inconvenience. A ramp can remove the barrier created by a staircase, but it will not enable me to play cricket in the park. Accessible transport can make it easier for me to leave home, but it does not eliminate my need for attendants. We must challenge the barriers society creates without denying the limitations some impairments create.

For me, Disability Pride is not pride in pain or physical limitation, but the refusal to accept that those limitations make our lives less valuable or our ambitions less legitimate. It is also the acceptance by society that persons with disabilities can play a meaningful role in it.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures the key updates from July 3 to July 16, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. NIMHANS study highlights ageing parents' concerns over long-term care: A new study by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) captures the anxieties of ageing parents caring for adult children with intellectual disabilities, with many expressing fears about who will provide care, protect their children, and support them after they are gone. The qualitative study foregrounds a common concern of identifying a reliable guardian for these children, especially as caregivers in the family age and deal with their own physical limitations.

   

2. A disability-centric lens to engaging with the economy: A new white paper by EnAble India and Deloitte estimates that disability-linked needs already represent a US$150 billion addressable market in India, arguing that PwDs should be recognised not only as beneficiaries of welfare but also as workers, consumers, entrepreneurs and creators who drive economic growth. Reinforcing this case, a recent report by the Godrej DEI Lab finds that corporates that embraced disability-inclusion recorded increased profit margins and visible productivity gains.

3. Former Afghanistan cricketer Shapoor Zadran passes away after battling a rare immune disorder: Former Afghan fast bowler Shapoor Zadran passed away at the age of 38 after a prolonged battle with Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a rare and life-threatening immune disorder. He had travelled to New Delhi for treatment on the advice of doctors in Afghanistan, underscoring the limited availability of specialised care in many low- and middle-income countries. While India has comparatively greater access to advanced medical facilities than countries such as Afghanistan, treatment for rare diseases remains concentrated in a handful of tertiary hospitals and is often prohibitively expensive.

   

4. Uttar Pradesh to extend permanent disability insurance cover to government school teachers: The basic education department in UP is partnering with the State Bank of India to extend a group term life insurance cover to all permanent employees, which will include a permanent disability insurance cover of Rs 1 crore. Further, contractual employees will receive an insurance cover of Rs 30 lakhs in case of permanent disability, and Rs 15 lakhs for partial disability.

5. Cancer patient dies awaiting verdict in plea for affordable treatment: A woman who approached the Kerala High Court in 2022 seeking affordable access to two life-saving breast cancer medicines died before the court could deliver its verdict. Her petition, which sought lower prices for Ribociclib and Abemaciclib costing up to ₹1.5 lakh a month, was listed for hearing 57 times over four years without a final decision.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Supreme Court Slams CRPF for Violating Disability Protection Law by Removing Driver After Vision Loss, Directs ₹1.25 Crore Compensation

2. Acid attack survivors with internal injuries to get disability law benefits: Centre tells SC

3. Disability verification systems yield different outcomes for UPSC and UP government

4. Revolutionary AI Assistive Technologies Launched for Visually Impaired, Promoting Accessibility in India

5. Journal article recommends National Dental Commission revising dental curriculum should include disability inclusive reforms

6. India’s 40°C Classrooms are Cooking Children’s Brains – Why Does No Policy Treat Heat as a Learning Disability

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Samika Dandge along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

A few years ago, a friend invited me to attend her wedding in Lucknow. “The hotel is completely wheelchair accessible,” she told me reassuringly. “There are no steps at the entrance.” Excited, I booked my tickets and sent my wheelchair-accessible vehicle to Lucknow a day earlier. As the day came closer, excitement gave way to anxiety. I knew what “accessible” often meant for hotels.

When I reached the hotel, I was surprised. It had a ramp, and the gradient was near perfect. Everything seemed to be working.

The real test awaited upstairs. I went up to my room. My attendant and I entered, looked around, and realised to our horror that the bathroom door was too narrow for my commode chair.

I could not be carried to the toilet. In this room, the chair simply could not enter.

I called the reception and requested another room. The staff showed us half a dozen more. Every bathroom had the same problem. Finally, they declared this was the hotel’s standard design.

By now, I had begun to panic.

Shankar, my attendant, who has been with me since childhood, was much calmer. He arranged for a screwdriver kit. Then, with remarkable composure, removed the bathroom door from its hinges. That gave us the extra two inches we needed. Two inches. The difference between attending a wedding and having to leave the city.

I think about that door often. Last week, I came across Xiaoban, a self-driving robotic toilet developed in China for elderly people and those with mobility impairments. It can move autonomously to the user and assist with cleaning and waste management, tackling some of the everyday challenges that make basic bodily needs so difficult. It reminded me of a feature in The Economist where its editor Nick Valéry called the flush toilet the greatest invention of all time because it transformed public health and human dignity. Unfortunately, the ‘greatest invention’ continues to be inaccessible to many like me in most places. We built empires on the idea that a body deserves privacy and dignity when it relieves itself, but we forgot to build that idea for every body.

My struggle with toilets did not begin in Lucknow, and it has never been about one bad hotel. I went through all of school without a disabled toilet. It meant never drinking water outside home and training my bladder to hold on for hours. Years later, during my Master's at the Delhi School of Economics, I sat for placements. One company told me it would prefer not to hire me, because tomorrow I might sue them for not having a disabled toilet.

Today, awareness about disabled toilets has certainly increased, at least in metropolitan India. Yet too often, the disabled toilet is used as a storeroom, or locked with no one sure where the key is.

Even when a so-called accessible toilet exists, it is often designed around a narrow imagination of disability. It assumes that the user can stand a little, shift independently, use grab bars, and transfer onto the toilet seat. For those of us who cannot stand, grab bars are not enough. What we often need is a bench or changing surface where an attendant can transfer us and then pull down our pants. So we invent our own systems. Some wear diapers through the day. Others, like me, carry a urination jar that we can use whenever we get access to a bed.

As the world races toward AI and robotics, I am glad some technologists are finally thinking about this physiological need for disabled people as well.

It gives me hope. Hope, that one day, I will be able to go out in public and drink a glass of water without first calculating its consequences.

That, for many of us, would be a revolution.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from June 19 to July 02, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Supreme Court: The right to walk is a fundamental right - In a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court held that safe, unobstructed, and disability-friendly footpaths are protected under Article 21, recognising accessibility as a constitutional obligation rather than a matter of municipal discretion. It directed all States and Union Territories to frame pedestrian policies and ensure accessible, encroachment-free footpaths, reaffirming that public infrastructure must be inclusive by design, not by exception.

2. Hysterectomy, disability, and reproductive autonomy - The Karnataka High Court permitted a hysterectomy for a 23-year-old woman with severe intellectual disability after a medical board found that she was unable to manage menstrual hygiene independently, leading to recurring infections and health complications. While the Court's decision was grounded in medical assessment and judicial oversight, it raises longstanding disability rights concerns about irreversible reproductive interventions, bodily autonomy, and whether such procedures risk prioritising caregiving convenience over the rights of disabled women.

   

3. Madhya Pradesh makes mental health awareness compulsory for college freshers - MP has become the first state to make mental health awareness a mandatory part of college induction, covering stress, anxiety, depression, anti-ragging, and grievance mechanisms, effective from July 1 across all government and private colleges. The initiative reflects a preventive approach in line with the Supreme Court recommendations.

4. Andhra Pradesh opens 125 Autism Support Centres in government schools - AP has sanctioned 125 Autism Support Centres across government schools under the Samagra Shiksha programme, designed to provide speech therapy, physiotherapy, and early intervention. The centres are meant to complement existing Bhavita centres for children with special needs. However, relying primarily on the existing instructor pool could strain already limited human resources as demand grows.

   

5. Visually impaired users in Mumbai band together to challenge CAPTCHA barriers - Building on the momentum of the recent Trade Mark Portal ruling, visually impaired users in Mumbai are collectively pushing back against CAPTCHA-based access barriers across digital platforms. The organised pushback signals a shift: inaccessible design is no longer being treated as an unfortunate default but as a challengeable wrong.

6. Odisha proposes drive to clear disability certification backlog - With nearly 40,000 UDID applications pending across Odisha, the state has proposed authorising the State Institute for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (SIEPD) to assess all age groups. The institute currently conducts disability assessments only for children aged 0-18. Expanding its mandate could speed up certification, but unless district-level processing delays are addressed, the backlog is likely to build up again.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. India’s Persons With Disabilities Left Out As NFHS-6 Fact Sheets Omit Disability Data

2. Mumbai footpaths still inaccessible despite BMC accessibility policy

3. Sustaining India’s low-fertility future

4. Why getting a disability certificate is still a herculean task for Kerala’s neurodivergent persons

5. Disability rights and India’s heat emergency

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Samika Dandge along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Nipman Foundation’s first office was on the 10th floor of a tall DLF tower in South East Delhi.

We had done our research on the building’s compatibility with accessibility needs. The building had accessible parking and toilets, and an elevator with power backup. This mattered because Delhi summers came with load shedding, and for a wheelchair user on the 10th floor, a corporate steel and glass construction is just house arrest with better stationery.

One month after we moved in, the building manager came to my office and requested that I leave early that day.

“Why?” I asked.

“We are having a fire drill today,” he said. “As per protocol, we will be switching off the elevators. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“What would happen during a real fire?” I asked.

He had not really thought of it.

India has spent years asking whether disabled people can enter buildings. We have barely asked whether they can get out alive.

I went into professorial mode and explained the need for an evacuation chair. It resembles a slim emergency wheelchair: upright, strapped, and with tracks that allow a seated person to be guided down stairs instead of being carried in panic by untrained people.

Hong Kong has gone further. It requires buildings above two storeys to provide fire lifts. A fire lift is designed to keep working in a crisis, with protected systems, backup power and firefighter override controls. When everyone else is told not to use the lift, firefighters may still need one to reach people trapped on higher floors. For a wheelchair user, it can be the difference between life and death.

A few months later, a Deaf individual got a job in the same building. I went back to the same manager and asked, “What is the evacuation plan for him?”

“He can use the stairs, can’t he?” the manager asked.

Of course he could. But that was not the point. All the fire alarms in the building were sound-based, inaccessible to him.

Similarly, exit signs, floor plans, flashing lights and people pointing towards a staircase assume danger can be navigated visually. For a blind or low-vision person, an alarm may signal danger without giving a safe way out. Without visual alarms, audio instructions, tactile wayfinding, trained assistance and uncluttered routes, emergency planning effectively becomes: save yourself if your body allows it.

What was once a story I narrated with humour has now turned into a foreshadowing of horror. The fire that tore through the bed and breakfast in Malviya Nagar took many lives and exposed the failures of a system that still confuses paperwork with preparedness. The fire has shaken the country and started a conversation on fire safety norms, illegal constructions, blocked exits, delayed response, overcrowding and regulatory neglect.

And yet, nobody is asking this: what happens when the person who needs to escape cannot run down the stairs?

A local healthcare worker who entered the burning building reportedly found a man in a wheelchair, burned to death. That detail should haunt every fire-safety conversation in India.

After Malviya Nagar, emergency exits have become the zeitgeist of Delhi conversations. But the conversation cannot stop at exits. We also need to ask who can use those exits, hear the alarm, see the warning, follow the route, descend the stairs, and who will be left waiting for rescue that may never arrive.

The facility was reportedly housing medical tourists, including many elderly people and persons with restricted mobility. How were they expected to escape what was practically a fire trap? Our laws do not answer this. India’s Accessibility Standards for Disaster Mitigation Centres mention evacuation chairs as a suggestion for vertical evacuation. There is no enforceable mandate making disability-inclusive evacuation routine in fire safety planning.

Contrast this with Singapore, which set out detailed fire-safety requirements for persons with disabilities in 2011, covering PWD holding points, wheelchair stairlifts, evacuation lifts, continuous handrails and visual alarms.

Singapore answered many of these questions fifteen years ago.

In India, we are still pretending the staircase is a plan.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from June 5 to June 18, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Supreme Court notices on child rehabilitation centre: The Supreme Court issued notice in a PIL challenging the systemic lack of regulatory oversight and the need to mandate baseline standards at rehabilitation facilities for children with disabilities across the country. The petition documented children being denied therapy due to unqualified staff, unsafe environments, and exploitative fee structures, and cited a horrific incident where a youth with ADHD was beaten to death at a Tamil Nadu facility.

2. Yes to Access meets Sugamya Bharat: APD’s Yes to Access platform has been integrated with the government’s Sugamya Bharat App, creating a shared system through which citizens can report accessibility barriers and map accessible spaces. At a time when many public buildings continue to fall short of basic accessibility standards, the initiative represents a shift towards more continuous, community-driven monitoring of the built environment.

   

3. Tamil Nadu halts doorstep physiotherapy, disabled children left without care: Tamil Nadu's Mobile Therapy Units giving doorstep physiotherapy service for children with disabilities have reportedly been suspended, leaving many families without access to regular rehabilitation support. Designed to reach children unable to access institutional care due to geographic barriers, the programme often represented the only rehabilitation service available to rural households.

   

4. Karnataka HC expands the scope of accessibility obligations: In a landmark order, the Karnataka High Court issued a detailed Standard Operating Procedure for Universal Accessibility, mandating that all government buildings as well as private buildings including schools, malls, hospitals, transport hubs and digital platforms, become fully accessible to persons with disabilities. The order also articulated that no building will get an occupancy certificate unless it complies with the accessibility requirements as mandated under the RPwD Act.

5. Guardianship woes and mismatched frameworks: The Kerala High Court overturned a district collector’s decision refusing guardianship to the father of a 21-year-old woman with Down syndrome, holding that Down syndrome falls within the scope of intellectual disability recognised under the National Trust Act. While Down syndrome has been recognised as a disability under the RPwD Act, it was not categorically mentioned in the National Trust Act, the law that governs the appointment of legal guardians.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Nathdwara Temple directed to improve accessibility

2. Push for low-floor buses in Odisha to improve accessibility for PwDs

3. UNICEF launches platform on early childhood inclusion and Disability Support

4. Punjab’s question bank-based policy for visually impaired students challenged in court

5. Beyond Welfare: Why India’s Disability Sector Must Be Seen Through Livelihood, Capability and Dignity

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Samika Dandge along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

Dear Reader,

In college, my friends and I fashioned ourselves as expert tennis analysts, except that our expertise derived more from confidence than knowledge. Most of us did not really understand the finer nuances of the sport. But that did not stop us from picking sides. You were either Team Federer or Nadal.

Federer was elegance personified–artistic, smooth, almost choreographed. Nadal moved differently–muscular, sweaty, carrying an intense underdog energy. Having been an underdog throughout my life, I quickly became Team Nadal.

So when the limited series Rafa dropped on Netflix last week, I was excited to watch it. I expected a familiar sports documentary: the usual sporting arc of struggle, comeback and greatness. But midway through the first episode, the documentary revealed something far deeper and unacknowledged.

Right after Nadal won the French Open in 2005, he was diagnosed with Müller-Weiss syndrome, a rare degenerative condition affecting the navicular bone in the foot. Medical advice rang a death-knell on his tennis career.

But underdogs find a workaround, as did Nadal. Custom-made insoles were designed to reduce pressure on the damaged bone and allow him to keep playing. But disabilities, especially degenerative conditions, do not fit into neat solutions. Over time, the insoles contributed to severe tendinitis in his knee and repeated injuries. Long-term medication to manage pain also caused serious intestinal issues. The price of staying on court was paid by other parts of his body.

The evolving biomechanics that accompany disability are often missed by our disability assessment frameworks. The body degenerates in ways not always visible. Disability is often immeasurable, and affects the body in invisible ways before visible ramifications can surface.

As someone born with a visible disability, I have often felt that disability acquired or diagnosed later in life can be, in some ways, harder to process. This is not to romanticise congenital disability. The world is still deeply inaccessible to those of us born disabled. But we have at least grown up negotiating with our bodies and with society. I never had to discover disability as a new fact about myself. Nadal’s journey of having to reimagine his body and future, stayed with me.

On 30th May, observed as World Multiple Sclerosis Day in the community, I was forced to revisit Nadal’s journey. Multiple Sclerosis is a chronic neurological condition affecting the central nervous system. It can cause fatigue, vision problems, pain, mobility issues and cognitive difficulties; and most importantly, it is a fluctuating condition.

For many people with MS, and other invisible or episodic conditions, disability is not a singular public condition, but a fluctuating, evolving negotiation with the body on days it refuses to cooperate. And unlike Nadal, most people do not have elite medical teams, custom solutions and a global support system helping them renegotiate those terms. They have unaccommodative employers, confused families, doctors incapable of diagnosing them, and state systems and legislative frameworks that still prefer disability to be visible, permanent, measurable and easy to certify.

That is why the National Policy Dialogue on World MS Day, led by the Multiple Sclerosis Society of India, matters. Its 10-point Declaration called for stronger recognition of invisible and episodic disabilities under the RPwD Act, flexible certification, better healthcare and workplace inclusion, insurance access, and a National Mission for Invisible Disabilities. This is not a demand unique to any one patient group. It raises a broader structural question: does the state recognise only those disabilities that are visible, measurable, and readily certifiable, or can it respond to people's needs before they are forced into public crisis?

The launch of MS Harmony in Kerala is important for the same reason. Bringing together persons with MS, NMO, MOGAD and Myasthenia Gravis, it aims to make Kerala India’s first invisible-disability-friendly state.

India’s disability framework cannot remain built only around the disabilities that announce themselves visibly. Access must also include those whose disability is doubted precisely because it cannot always be seen. Otherwise, we are not recognising disability. We are only recognising evidence that makes the non-disabled comfortable.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from May 23 to June 4, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Supreme Court seeks Centre’s response on non-compliance with disability panel’s recommendations: Intervening in a public interest litigation (PIL) petition, the Supreme Court directed the government to respond to allegations of widespread non-compliance with recommendations made by disability commissions. The plea contended that the Chief Commissioner for PwD (CCPD) rarely imposed fines on any defaulting authorities, despite being authorised by the RPwD Act. Further, there has been no full-time CCPD at the Centre since 2019. The petition also states that only four state commissioners had operational online grievance portals.

   

2. Acid attack survivor wins rights to disability review: Twelve years ago, a relative threw acid at Reshma Qureshi as revenge in his ongoing marital dispute. Despite the severe burns on her face, evisceration of her left eye and damaged vision in the right eye, her disability was assessed as “low vision”. The Delhi High Court has rectified this by ordering a reassessment. Reshma’s UDID now reflects 63% disability and multiple disabilities, establishing her as a Person with Benchmark Disability and entitling her to state benefits.

3. CBSE mandates native languages for students, exempts CwSN: CBSE is set to introduce a three language policy for high school students, mandating students to learn at least two native Indian languages. However, the policy does not clarify whether Indian Sign Language (ISL) can be studied as one of these languages, missing an opportunity to advance linguistic inclusion for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The Board has also exempted children with special needs (CwSN) from the language requirement, presenting this as a reasonable accommodation under Section 17(i) of the RPwD Act. Yet, it loses the opportunity to include accessible teaching methods to teach subjects in an inclusive curriculum.

   

4. Mental health screening tool launched for deafblind persons: Sense International India has launched SII-SAMWED, India’s first structured and statistically validated mental health screening tool for children and young adults with deafblindness and multiple disabilities. Designed for two age groups, children (10 - 18 years) and young adults (19 - 29 years), the tool assesses mental well-being across emotional regulation, behavioural patterns, social functioning, cognitive and physiological health, and substance use among young adults. The tool intends to address the emotional neglect experienced by deafblind individuals due to restricted communication and social interaction.

5. District by Zomato launches Inclusive Dining Toolkit for restaurants: District by Zomato has launched an Inclusive Dining Toolkit to help restaurants identify accessibility gaps and improve dining experiences for PwD, elderly persons, pregnant women, and others. Developed in collaboration with the DEPwD and disability rights organisations, the toolkit provides practical guidance on accessibility measures and was launched alongside new accessibility-focused features on the District platform, including accessibility filters, screen-reader support, and information on wheelchair and elevator access.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Applications open for the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities 2026, with submissions accepted through the Rashtriya Puraskar Portal until 31 July 2026

2. NEET paper leak debate ignores barriers faced by students with disabilities

3. Army discharged him for schizophrenia, denied disability pension; his widow wins in court after 4 decades

4. Birla temple denies entry to PwD, state body seeks report

5. Disabled flyer claims Air India deplaned her over fit-to-fly certificate

6. Delhi’s big welfare push on anvil: Children with disabilities may soon get up to Rs 13L health cover

7. Disabled security guard thrashed, mowed down twice by SUV over parking tiff in West Delhi

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Samika Dandge along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear reader,

Rohit De and Ornit Shani, in their archival work on India’s constitutional history, highlight what may be one of the earliest instances of disability-rights advocacy in modern India. The Deaf and Dumb Society of India, wrote to the Constituent Assembly with a simple argument: equal citizenship meant little if laws enabling discrimination remained untouched and the disabled were not guaranteed access to education and employment. The Assembly’s response was that universal adult franchise would be sufficient protection. The Society pushed back. The vote alone, they argued, could not substitute for accessible education, concrete job guarantees and protection from discrimination.

The final Constitution, however, saw only one explicit mention of disability. This was in Entry 9 of the State List: “Relief of the disabled and unemployable”. The phrase summed it all up. Persons with Disabilities did not enter the Constitution in the context of rights, representation or equality, but as a matter of relief.

Fast forward to 1953, a by-election was held in Calcutta South East after the tragic death of Syama Prasad Mukherjee. It was won by Sadhan Gupta, a blind barrister from the Communist Party of India. He typed in Braille, spoke in fluent English and is remembered as a founder of the National Federation of the Blind. However, Sadhan Gupta was an aberration, for India was not even counting its disabled population then.

For decades, disability continued to be framed less as a question of citizenship and more as a matter of welfare, rehabilitation and relief. The two major schemes launched during this period were both around distribution of Disability aids: ALIMCO in 1972 and ADIP in 1981.

However, a shift was beginning to take place. By the early 1990s, the Movement was beginning to find legislative expression. In 1992, India became a signatory to the Proclamation on the Full Participation and Equality of People with Disabilities in the Asian and Pacific Region. In the same year, the Rehabilitation Council of India Act came into force, seeking to standardise the training of rehabilitation professionals and promote research in special education.

Then came December 1995.

On the last day of the winter session of Parliament, Javed Abidi led a march to Parliament. That mobilisation helped push through what became the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995. For the first time, persons with disabilities in India received statutory recognition, protection against discrimination, and reservations in education and employment. The National Trust Act, 1999, followed soon after, extending the legal framework to persons with autism, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities and multiple disabilities, though still within a largely welfare and guardianship-oriented imagination.

By the 2000s, one thing had become increasingly clear. The 1995 Act had given disabled people legal recognition, but no protection.

Then India ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007. In 2010, a committee was formed to draft a UNCRPD-compliant law for the country. The legal consultant to this committee was Professor Amita Dhanda. The first version of the law was drafted as a Bill in 2011. A long battle followed, eventually resulting in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016.

The RPwD Act marked a decisive shift. It expanded the list of recognised disabilities. It increased reservations and spoke of disability in the language of equality, dignity, non-discrimination, accessibility and participation.

Has the Act lived up to expectations? Few people are better placed to answer this question than Professor Amita Dhanda herself.

I have grown up reading her work on disability and law and her writings have in many ways shaped my rights-based approach towards disability. So when she agreed to write this special piece for AccessPoint on ten years of the RPwD Act, it felt like something of a fanboy moment.

Read on as the drafter of the Act puts on the juror’s hat.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

A discourse changing decade: the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 by Professor Amita Dhanda

Before I evaluate the first decade performance of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 (hereinafter RPDA); I wish to briefly state the manner in which RPDA modified the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunity, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act of 1995 (hereinafter PWDA).

Unlike all the legislative and programmatic interventions which had occurred in the field of disability, the RPDA acknowledged the civil-political rights of persons with disabilities. Along with affirmative action initiatives the statute recognised the discrimination and exclusion experienced by persons with disabilities. Whilst equality, life and liberty, speech and expression found mention; the RPDA most importantly recognised the disabled persons right to participation. It is this right more than any other which has driven the disability rights interventions in the last decade.

The RPDA in opting for a more capacious definition of disability (including as many as 21 impairments) and allowing for its further expansion in the years to come chose to err towards inclusion. By creating the category of benchmark disability, the statute accepted that there was a link between the severity of the impairment and the need for affirmative action measures. However, in severing the experience of discrimination from the severity of the impairment the RPDA acknowledged that ableism could be experienced irrespective of the nature and extent of the impairment.

Accessibility had a very limited and elitist articulation in the PWDA; in the RPDA the pervasiveness of the obligation of accessibility was acknowledged. The induction of the CRPD principles in the text of the statute and seeking the creation of equal opportunity policies the statute admitted that law could not be just a rule making enterprise. There was a need for value-based guidance in the form of principles and there was a requirement for evolving programmatic interventions in the shape of policy. The obligations to formulate equal opportunity policies at the workplace being an apposite illustration.

As is the wont of writing efforts such as this one, the next logical question would be: did the RPDA succeed in achieving all that it set out to do? How should we grade the statute in its ten-year report card? Has it abysmally failed or largely succeeded or what? The question does not lend itself to a black and white answer. It is neither a ‘gung ho’ nor a ‘down in the dumps’ situation. May I suggest that in order to understand the impact of the RPDA we do not just look at the tangible achievements but also the non-tangible gains. Since the tangible achievements and failures will receive multiple iterations, I am using my 800-word limit to dwell on the non-tangible progress of the decade. As someone who has been engaging with the concerns of persons with disability well before the RPDA, I find myself experientially equipped to undertake the exercise.

It is often said that with both the PWDA and the RPDA disability discourse moved from welfare to rights. The most significant change on this count has not necessarily come in the manner in which States and establishments provide for persons with disabilities. Traces of the welfare model keep surfacing in both their attitudes and their programs. The real change has come in the manner in which persons with disabilities are seeking their entitlements. They are demanding without embarrassment or shame. It is this assertion, which in everyday interaction results in the shamefacedness of event organisers if they have not made accessibility arrangements or causes the non-disabled others (notwithstanding the use of divyang) to look for the suitable linguistic expression to describe a person with disability.

Administrators often understand the right to participation as restricted to consulting persons with disabilities on matters of disability law and policy. However, persons with disability have not acceded to this perception. The participation of persons with disabilities in elections and the census process as also their visible presence in public places (especially at airports) is a case in point.

Have persons with disabilities obtained all that they deserve? The answer realistically has to be in the negative. It is found that very often the same issue has to be repeatedly agitated for example admission into medical colleges. The strength is not in the law but in the people. I see the battles around the right to accessibility as the most suitable karmabhoomi for disability inclusion. I say this because accessibility requires every section of society to engage with disability.

PWD have fought for every centimetre of space they have gained and the struggle is far from over. To continue this struggle and to win the war, it is necessary to not just look how far we have to go; but also see how far we have come.

Professor Amita Dhanda is Professor Emerita and Head, Centre for Disability Studies, NALSAR Hyderabad.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. BIS Issues New Norms for Walking Sticks to Braille Signage—What Changes

2. The 1000 day window: Why AIIMS is warning against the infant screen time

3. Visible impact: how Hong Kong film ‘Invisible Differences’ is changing perceptions of neurodiversity

4. Chandigarh residents oppose plan to merge senior home with mental care facility

5. IHBAS holds ‘Gatekeeper Training’ for teachers to boost mental health awareness

6. RBSK 2.0 misses disability lens, experts flag gaps in flagship child screening programme

7. Rs 2 Lakh Hearing Aid For Rs 1999? How IITians And An Audiologist Are Rewriting The Rules Of Hearing Care In India

8. Maharashtra’s Extended UDID Card Deadline: A Lifeline for Persons with Disabilities

9. Bombay High Court Upholds State’s Power To Reassess Disability Certificates Of Govt Employees, Warns Fraudulent PwD Claims Constitute Moral Turpitude

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

This edition of AccessPoint was developed collaboratively by the editorial team, Tithi Neogi and Samika Dandge along with the communications team comprising Suyashi Smridhi and Pranav Rao.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

I remember an incident a few years ago when I was looking to rent a house in South Delhi. I visited and rejected many houses till I finally found one that was accessible. However, on my first meeting with my landlord, he came up with a weird request “We cannot give the house in your name. It will have to be in your father's or mother's”. He clearly did not trust my capability to pay or for me to make financially autonomous decisions. To me, this was an insult, and I rejected the offer. I am proud to be financially independent, paying for my rent, attendants and all other essential expenditures.

However, the Reserve Bank of India’s recent discussion paper on safeguarding digital payments against fraud proposes something that will take away this independence from many like me. A mandatory additional factor of authentication for transactions above ₹50,000 for persons with disabilities and individuals aged 70 and above. While the measure could support persons with severe intellectual disabilities who are legally required to have guardians, the sad truth is that it treats the diverse PwD community as a homogenous group. This could also create barriers to independently accessing essential financial services, especially given persistent accessibility gaps in authentication infrastructure. Feedback on this discussion paper is open, and I would urge all readers to write to the RBI expressing their concerns.

But this instinct to “protect” disabled people by limiting their autonomy is not limited to banking. It shows up in housing, in education, in hospitals, in government offices, and even in the way society looks at disabled parents.

The same presumption of incapacity also shadows disabled people in more intimate spaces, especially parenthood. Society often struggles to see disabled adults as decision-makers. It struggles even more to see them as caregivers.

This is where the lives of CODAs, Children of Deaf Adults, become so important. Imagine being born in a household where sound does not form the primary basis of speech. The family communicates, but in Indian Sign Language. Parents understand your emotions and give comfort, not by hearing, but by touch.

Two of my closest friends are CODAs, and they have been my window into the Deaf community. Surbhi Taneja, Founder of CODA India, introduced me to what Deaf culture really means. Ananta Jain, a gifted writer herself and our guest contributor today, has helped me understand even more deeply the nuances of living life as a CODA.

She once told me about how her parents kept a hand on her chest as a baby when they slept, so that the vibrations from her crying or moving around could wake them.

That image has stayed with me. It is intimate, inventive, and deeply loving. And yet, outside that home, the same parents may be met by a world that questions their ability to raise a child, navigate systems, or make decisions for their family.

What happens when a child realises that what is normal for her is seen by the outside world as an “unconventional household”? That as she grows up, there will be adults who refuse to see her parents as equals when it comes to navigating life and raising children?

26th April was celebrated as CODA Day. So we thought, why not dedicate this edition to understanding what it means to be a CODA?

Fasten your seatbelts and read on in this beautiful piece by Ananta Jain.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

Tangling and Untangling the Knots Between Sign and Sound: On Growing Up as a CODA by Ananta Jain

CODAs, or Children of Deaf Adults, are the children born to Deaf parents, for whom Sign Language is often the first language they encounter after birth. This results from interacting with one’s parent(s) in sign language, in turn acquiring it as their first language of expression. Since I was raised by deaf parents, I grew up knowing Indian Sign language as my mother tongue.

I first came across this term, CODA, at the age of ten during a conference my parents were attending. I grew up in a family of 17 deaf people, believing that the entire world is deaf. This bubble burst when I entered school and saw families that looked different from mine. So learning this term deepened my curiosity: where did CODA come from?

In the late 80s, Millie Brother coined the term CODA—Children of Deaf Adults—for people like us. When I met her last year, I instantly asked her how the acronym came to be. A pianist herself, she turned to music to find meaning in who she is. A coda, in musical terms, is the tail of a composition: the passage that gathers what the piece has been and leads it towards a resolution. She imagined that children of deaf adults occupy a similar space, a tail to the Deaf community, carrying the register of the melody to a close; something that extends but stays within the song.

I naturally went to Reddit to look for songs that could make me feel like myself. I found out that The Beatles’ famous “Hey Jude” has a recognisable coda. The ending, that brings it to the finale, forms another route into the same voices, instruments, arrangement of the song. This is exactly the experience of a CODA. We formulate a unique position between the Deaf and the hearing world, often finding ourselves dwindling between cultures that are unlike each other but still the same, human. The very texture of our lives needs to be understood thread-by-thread; knots between these two worlds are formed through the many conceptions we knowingly and unknowingly spill over to one another.

However, connecting these two worlds is a constant negotiation that we mitigate as we grow older and embody two realities—while building one of our own. Especially since deaf parent(s)’ experience of raising their children is repeatedly met with a certain sense of dismal objection. They are questioned about their capacity to provide the child with a sound environment for holistic growth. Hearing individuals often assume that these children, CODAs, would “turn Deaf” and/or not be able to acquire or inherit a language. These prejudices show that society operates through an ableist lens - one that not only denies accessibility to the Deaf community but then penalises them for the consequences.

CODAs also become witnesses to this very precarious relationship. During their conversation about marriage, my parents were met with copious disapproval due to the high possibility of giving birth to another deaf child. They were advised to meet with medical professionals and take up genetic testing to ensure the same. The hearing society assumes a self-proclaimed responsibility of telling people with disabilities what they can or cannot do. The right to form families and raise children is a decision that must lie with the individuals themselves; ableist stereotypes continue to perpetuate the cycle of denial to persons with disabilities.

I, along with many other CODAs, spend years tangling and untangling the knots between sign and sound. And this constant tussle between the two worlds cannot take away from the space that we flourish in. As we mark the last Sunday of April as Deaf Parent’s Day, we carry this melody forward, of being seen and known just as who we are–in flux, in vortex, in between our two worlds.

Ananta Jain is a freelance photographer, videographer and Indian Sign Language interpreter. She is currently working with Raqs Media Collective as a researcher and web content editor. Her work has previously been published on The Caravan, The Wire and India Development Review.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Supreme Court Recognises Acid Ingestion Victims Under RPwD Act

2. Supreme Court pulls up states over disability rights compliance, sets ‘final’ May 15 deadline to appoint nodal officers

3. TN election results 2026: Munirathinam becomes Tamil Nadu’s first MLA with a disability

4. HC makes Rapido’s Disability Friendly undertaking permanently binding under RPwD Act

5. Retired MCD worker with disability dies trapped in Paharganj house fire

6. Geopolitical conflicts could lead to polio resurgence

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

For two days last week, Parliament came alive. A special sitting of the Lok Sabha convened to debate three interlinked Bills that would redraw India's electoral map. This was the first such exercise since 1971 and would finally activate women's reservation. One hundred and thirty members spoke. Fifty-six of them were women. North argued with South. The government clashed with opposition. Seat counts were disputed, census data was weaponised, and the federal compact was interrogated late into the night. It was, by any measure, a significant moment for Indian democracy.

And yet, through all of it, through every speech about representation, every invocation of inclusion, every argument about whose voice would be amplified or diluted by the redrawing of lines – not one member of Parliament raised the question of Persons with Disabilities.

Not once.

Controversially, the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill proposed anchoring the delimitation exercise to the 2011 Census. The political debate focused on what this meant for North-South seat shares and women’s representation in the Parliament. What went unexamined is what the 2011 Census means for disability. That census recognised seven categories of disability. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, now recognises twenty-one. An entire generation of Indians, those living with conditions recognised by law only after 2016, are invisible in the data that would have governed this exercise. The 2011 figure of 2.68 crore persons with disabilities is, by most credible estimates, a significant undercount. The real number is likely far higher. A delimitation exercise on this data would have been built on a foundation that already renders disability invisible.

While disability remained absent from the delimitation debate, a glimpse of what inclusion can look like emerged in Kottayam during the Kerala Assembly elections. Booth Number 95, a small creche near the Thirunakkara temple, was run entirely by PwD officials. The presiding officer was Binu, a high school assistant who is completely blind. Alongside him, his team managed a fully accessible space: ramps, wheelchairs, a careful redesign of the ordinary. It drew attention because it was unprecedented. It should be unremarkable. Democracy cannot be accessible at the polling booth and inaccessible in the legislature.

I want to end with a question I find genuinely difficult to answer: was Parliament more inclusive then than it is today? Not in the mere sense of physical accessibility. But in a different sense: in the willingness to let a blind man stand for election, win, and be heard.

Seven decades earlier, Sadhan Chandra Gupta became independent India's first visually impaired parliamentarian in 1953, winning from Kolkata Southeast against an internationally known jurist. He would sit in Parliament softly typing in Braille while listening to debates, and he would rise to speak in flawless English. He was elected again in 1957 and served until 1962. He later became the first blind Advocate General of West Bengal, and the founder-president of the National Federation of the Blind.

And that is why disability representation in Parliament is so important – not only on policy grounds, but also on something more elemental. Just having a blind MP in the house would sensitise colleagues on screen readers and digital public infrastructure. A wheelchair user would enlighten parliamentarians on the fact that access is much more than just ramps. Debates with a Deaf politician, almost automatically, would bring the focus to Indian Sign Language.

The response to a Right to Information filing reveals that the Government of India does not even maintain data on the disability status of its members. We do not know, as a matter of official record, how many PwDs have sat in Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha at any point in our history. What we cannot count, we cannot account for. And what we cannot account for, we will keep drawing out of the map.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from April 10 to April 23, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Supreme Court entrusts high-powered committee with enforcing disability rights in prisons: The Supreme Court has expanded a High-Powered Committee's mandate to examine whether prisoners with disabilities are actually receiving accessible infrastructure, assistive devices, and functional grievance redressal, after only 12 states and UTs filed compliance affidavits. The court invoked Articles 14 and 21 to underscore that incarceration does not suspend protections under the RPwD Act.

2. NIMHANS commits to adult dyslexia tests within three years: NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences) has told the Supreme Court that standardised assessment tools for adult dyslexia will be developed within three years. The absence of recognised tests has long prevented adults from obtaining formal diagnoses and with them, the legal protections the RPwD Act guarantees.

   

3. NCW calls for lifelong care for acid attack survivors: The National Commission for Women has recommended free lifelong medical care, a national case tracking registry, Zero FIR provisions, and faster passage of the pending Victims of Acid Attacks Bill, 2022 – extending coverage to forced ingestion cases as well.

4. Rajasthan HC pushes back on repeated disability re-evaluations: The Rajasthan High Court has held that subjecting PwDs to fresh medical assessments repeatedly is not justified, even as a probe into fraudulently obtained certificates continues. The ruling draws a line that matters: investigating fraud cannot become a pretext for unsettling the settled rights of those with disabilities.

   

5. Nationwide drug shortage hits thalassemia patients: Thalassemia patients across India are once again facing a critical shortage of life-saving medicines, a crisis that has recurred with troubling regularity. It reflects a recurring failure in supply chain planning for chronic and rare conditions, a vulnerability that falls hardest on PwDs who depend on uninterrupted access to medication to survive.

6. Mental health calls from PwDs in Karnataka go unanswered: Tele-MANAS, the government's flagship 24/7 free mental health helpline, has no provision for persons with hearing impairment – leaving out one of the groups it should be most equipped to serve. The gap is a pointed example of a wider pattern: digital mental health infrastructure in India is built without disability access in mind, making the RPwD Act's rehabilitation provisions effectively unreachable for many of those they were designed to protect.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Court of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities holds that the Trade Mark Portal is inaccessible and violates RPwD Act

2. Employees with disabilities at DDTC demand action against Deputy Superintendent over discriminatory remarks

3. My brother’s keeper - The hidden lives of siblings of disabled children.

4. Autism Acceptance Month: Care, from beyond the spectrum

5. Caring for the Caregiver: An Overlooked Priority in Epilepsy Care

6. India’s haemophilia fight needs more firepower

7. Daily OPDs, cancellation of old appointments bring down Sassoon disability certificates pendency

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organisation that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the twenty-fourth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

I decided to binge Season Two of the Netflix legal comedy Maamla Legal Hai on the Good Friday weekend. What I didn’t expect was the opportunity it would give me to introspect—really introspect—about the state of disability in the country. The protagonist, Justice V.D. Tyagi (played by Ravi Kishan), is now the Principal District Judge and eager to make his mark. His reader steers him clear of anything “bold” or “visionary”. His suggestion: stick to “adequate”, “budget-friendly”, “balanced”. After initially trying to fight the system, Tyagi decides to do exactly that. He builds ramps, clears encroachments, and makes the court accessible. The episode ends with a pat on the back from the High Court, for a “balanced policy”. A standing ovation for the bare minimum.

This is a perfect example of how disability is looked at in the real world as well. The RPwD Act, 2016 mandates every establishment to publish an Equal Opportunity Policy for persons with disabilities (Section 21, read with Rule 8 of the RPwD Rules, 2017). Nearly a decade later, compliance remains the exception. Disability inclusion quietly sits in CSR, not HR. And when persons with disabilities do reach the courts, relief is rarely swift. The magnitude of the problem is highlighted by the fact that over 70% of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) complaints involve employment conditions. How disability isn’t considered with urgency is shown by how industry often violates, or worse, still ignores the CCPD’s orders. This has only slightly changed, at least on paper, after an April 2025 Delhi High Court ruling finally confirming they are binding.

This same trend is seen in courts too as Rahul Bajaj recently argued. Respondents in cases filed by a PwD often look at such cases as “non adversarial” - meaning they wish to be “constructive” and find a solution to the problem at hand. This, however, becomes a shield to achieve a quick compromise everyone can live with instead of a thorough, fact-based finding followed by an authoritative declaration of rights.

A ramp—whether in a web series or in real life—should not be seen as a goalpost for accessibility; it should be the baseline. While courts can enforce existing rights, it is Parliament that defines this baseline. We tracked discussions around disability during the Budget Session of Parliament, which concluded on April 2, with a particular focus on questions related to disability. Here’s what they reveal about where that baseline currently stands.

A question raised in the Rajya Sabha is telling of how low that baseline remains: whether all states have notified rules under the RPwD Act. The response, on paper, is reassuring: all states have notified rules. But the details tell a different story. State rules remain uneven, with gaps in accessibility standards. Take Madhya Pradesh for example, where RPwD Rules contain bizarre mandates—authorities are directed to “make slope on the steps for PwDs using wheelchairs”. Or better still ““to engrave the side of the railway platform for persons with blindness and low vision”. Of course, they don’t mention what is to be engraved and what accessibility standards the railway platforms should adhere to.

The same question also asked whether the UDID system is fully operational. While the response affirmed nationwide implementation of UDID, it also alluded to delays and statewise fragmentation. UDID delays stretch up to 600 days in official responses, and, in lived experience, often longer.

The RPwD Act was a game changer when it came to PwDs, looking at disability from a social lens for the first time. Unfortunately, most states have followed an approach of “just do enough”, i.e. notify the rules. The same is true with the UDID project, a potential game changer as a single window certification body for disability. However, it is up to states to ensure that it reaches PwDs. Today, only 1.3 Crore Indians have a UDID card. Even the 2011 census estimated (read grossly underestimated, as per most critiques) the number of PwDs as 2.6 crore. 7 disabilities were recognised then, unlike the 21 now.

India has a progressive legal framework and a structured system with the UDID card. However, states need to buck up. If India does want to be accessible, it needs to move beyond Tyagi’s ramps. It is time we stop treating the routine as remarkable.

Thank you for taking the time to read the twenty-fourth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you find this edition thoughtful and grounded in the realities it seeks to highlight.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

Parliamentary Question Tracker

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from March 27 to April 9, 2026.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. New law deepens risk for transpersons with disabilities: The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, replaces the self-identification framework of the 2019 Act with a medically gatekept certification process, requiring approval from a designated medical board before identity can be officially recognised. This directly violates the NALSA judgment. For transpersons with disabilities, already navigating compounded barriers, the added verification layer risks converting inherent rights into conditional privileges.

   

2. Disability certificates can’t be overruled by revenue officers, rules HC: The Chhattisgarh High Court ruled that a Sub-Divisional Officer has no authority to question the validity of a disability certificate. Disability certificates are issued by designated medical boards, and overruling them falls outside an SDO’s jurisdiction entirely. An important clarification that protects PwDs from arbitrary administrative interference.

3. Invisible disabilities remain invisible to law: The Delhi High Court ruled that without a certification of benchmark disability, bipolar disorder by itself does not qualify under the medical disability clause of the Central School’s transfer policy. The petitioner, a teacher, had sought modification of her transfer, based on medical records of ongoing treatment. The court, however, ruled that she did not have the extent of mental disability required to claim certain protections under the RPwD Act, like a medical transfer at work. Conditions like bipolar disorder, depression, or anxiety are rarely certifiable at that threshold because our system is built around disabilities that are visible and physically measurable.

   

4. Backlash against move to merge special and regular schools in Mumbai: Parents and teachers in Mumbai have opposed a government move to shift students with disabilities into mainstream schools, citing urgent concerns about the absence of trained staff, accessible infrastructure, and any transition plan. Special schools have historically filled gaps the mainstream system refuses to address, and dismantling them before regular schools are ready puts children with disabilities at risk.

5. Goa: scheme reaches 11,000 children, with a focus on retention: Over 11,000 children with disabilities received Rs 2.8 crore under a Goa government scheme that notably included escort allowances for children with severe disabilities to study in resource rooms within regular schools, alongside stipends for girl students with disabilities specifically to support their retention, with Rs 5 lakh reaching 265 girls up to December 2025. The state is also the first to adopt the Hyundai Samarth Accessibility Metric, a standardised benchmark that, if implemented meaningfully, could make accessibility a baseline rather than an afterthought.

   

6. Sadarem sees record rush as 57,000 apply in two days: Andhra Pradesh’s SADAREM (Software for Assessment of Disabled for Access Rehabilitation and Empowerment) disability certification portal received over 57,000 applications in just two days. This follows a recent development, wherein Andhra Pradesh officially recognised 5 new disability categories, bringing them into the digitised certification process. While the surge reflects rising awareness and adaptability with digitisation, it also highlights the delay in having recognised these disabilities within the formal processes.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. An overview of high-functioning autism at work

2. The RPwD Act has aged well. What are the gaps to be filled after a decade of progress

3. Maharashtra - an increase in the scholarship amount given to students with disabilities has been approved by the Department

4. West Bengal election authorities summon disabled persons for poll duty training, raising access concerns

5. Merit proven, opportunity denied — how the system continues to fail persons with disabilities

6. Over 60 blind, low-vision students explore astronomy in Kirori Mal College

7. US President Trump repeats ableist slur targeted at Joe Biden during Iran war briefing

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the twenty-third edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

Last week, Donald Trump suggested that a person with a learning disability is not fit to be president, targeting California Governor Gavin Newsom. He called him “low IQ” and repeated the claim multiple times.

The lack of understanding about learning disabilities here is hard to miss. Newsom has long spoken publicly about having dyslexia, not as a limitation, but as something that has shaped how he learns and leads. And yet, in a single move, that difference was reframed as disqualification.

The outrage these comments generated globally is understandable. But the uncomfortable truth is this: Trump is not alone. The idea that learning disabilities signal incapacity is not confined to political rhetoric in the United States. It also exists quietly and persistently within our classrooms, our workplaces, and our institutions in India.

A learning disability affects how the brain processes specific kinds of information, such as reading, writing, numbers, or auditory input. It says nothing about intelligence.

About 8–10% of children in India have specific learning disabilities. But who gets diagnosed tells its own story. Across studies, boys are identified far more often than girls, sometimes two to four times as often in conditions like ADHD. It’s not because they experience more difficulty, but because their struggles are more likely to be taken seriously. None of this determines a person’s capacity to think, lead, or contribute. And yet, we rarely hear this said out loud.

While Newsom has spoken openly about his dyslexia, no prominent Indian political leader has ever publicly acknowledged having a learning disability. In public life, such conditions are still treated as something to be managed quietly. That silence is its own kind of data.

Most children with learning disabilities in India are never diagnosed, especially outside urban centres. No diagnosis means no accommodation and no access to legal protections. The RPwD Act is only as meaningful as a child’s ability to access it, and right now, that access is deeply unequal.

Even where provisions exist, they remain difficult to navigate. CBSE offers scribes and extra time, but only with certification from government-recognised hospitals: a process that itself becomes a barrier for many families. The National Education Policy 2020 mentions learning disabilities just once, and only in the context of teacher training, with no substantive commitment to flexible curricula or alternative assessments. Meanwhile, India’s most widely cited annual education survey collects no data on children with disabilities at all.

This gap between recognition and reality spills over to employment as well. In Sudhanshu Kardam v. Comptroller and Auditor General of India, two candidates, one with a Specific Learning Disability, cleared the SSC Combined Graduate Level Examination on merit. Yet their appointments were denied, based on an outdated list of eligible posts.

The Supreme Court was unambiguous. There was no legal basis for rejection. If posts were already filled, supernumerary positions must be created. Yet, the question remains: why did it take a Supreme Court judgment for candidates who had already proven their merit to access employment? What we see—across education and employment—is not a lack of ability but a system structured around exclusion.

Dignity for persons with learning disabilities should not depend on becoming a public figure or on winning a court case. It should not be earned through exception. It should be guaranteed by design, in every classroom, every recruitment process, and every policy room in the country.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from March 14 to March 26.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. New Trans Framework could undermine mental health- The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 has been passed by Parliament amid criticism from opposition and civil society over risks to healthcare access and dignity. Stricter identity verification may deepen exclusion—heightening mental health risks, particularly for trans persons with disabilities.

   

2. Supreme Court strikes ceiling cap on disability- In a significant verdict on inclusive public employment, the Supreme Court held an upper limit on the percentage of disability for recruitment as unconstitutional. The court reiterated that RPwD Act set thresholds at the minimum percentage to include PwDs, not to exclude those with a higher degree of disability who can otherwise perform the core function of a post.

3. MIB Mandates subtitles and audio descriptions for theatrical releases- The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting has mandated all films to have accessibility features, like subtitles and audio-descriptions, to be eligible for a censor certificate from 15th March 2026 onwards. At the same time, OTT Accessibility Guidelines that we highlighted previously have been challenged in the Delhi HC, contending dilution of the implementation structure which is against the time-bound compliance mandated by the RPwD Act.

   

4. Education and employment elude PwDs- The Central Bureau of Investigation has unearthed discrepancies worth crores in disbursal of central educational scholarships for students with disabilities. A disturbing example of how growing scrutiny over fraudulent disability certificates seemingly does not aid PwDs to access opportunities that are rightfully theirs.

5. Digital certificates for more disabilities in Andhra Pradesh- Andhra Pradesh has introduced digital certificates for five additional disability categories, finally bringing coverage to 21 disabilities (from 13). The state will also digitise manually issued certificates for haemophilia, thalassemia, and sickle cell disease. While the RPwD Act recognises 21 disability categories, this change highlights that implementation remains state-driven and uneven.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Supreme Court Directs CAG to Create Supernumerary Posts to accommodate candidates with ‘mental illness’ and ‘specific learning disability’

2. CAG audit flags gaps in MGNREGA execution in Karnataka

3. 100 Children on Brink as Lifesaving Funds for Rare Diseases Run Out

4. NHRC issues notice to IRDAI over life insurance denial to disabled persons

5. What Are Audible Traffic Signals? Why Delhi May Need Them Now

6. Why public spaces in India are a minefield for children with intellectual disabilities

7. At Safdarjung Hospital, a Sensory Park Is Redesigning Play for Children With Disabilities

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organisation that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the twenty-second edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

Hollywood rolls out the red carpet for the Oscars on 15th March, which means an early morning for those of us in India — bleary-eyed, already forming opinions, and fully prepared to hold court on WhatsApp about who deserved to win, who was robbed, and what on earth the Academy was thinking. You know the drill.

But there's always a disability angle worth examining, and this year is no different.

Here's something that's been called out ahead of this year's ceremony: able-bodied audiences have a complicated relationship with disability on screen. They tend to love inspiration porn — those overwhelmingly uplifting stories of people who "overcome" their disability and emerge as beacons of hope. These narratives are widely embraced because they offer audiences a sense of reassurance and optimism. The biographical drama Song Sung Blue, which traces a journey through alcoholism, addiction and disability, is being marketed almost entirely as an inspirational story — not a disability story. The distinction matters.

Bollywood also knows this playbook well. Taare Zameen Par was groundbreaking in bringing dyslexia into mainstream conversation through Ishaan Awasthi, a young boy whose undiagnosed condition goes unseen by everyone around him. Critically acclaimed, widely beloved — and yet, filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh once asked a quietly devastating question: What if Ishaan had no artistic talent to save him? What then? It's a question that cuts to the heart of the problem — films like Taare Zameen Par opened important doors, but they also quietly told audiences that people with disabilities need to be otherwise extraordinary just to earn basic human dignity. That's a heavy burden to place on anyone.

All this feeds into something bigger: how we talk about disability shapes how policy gets made. Take the UPSC Civil Services results — there will, without doubt, be feel-good headlines about candidates with disabilities who cracked it "against all odds." Those stories are real, and the achievements are genuinely remarkable. But the signal they send — quietly, persistently — is that individual superhuman effort is the solution to systemic barriers. What rarely makes headlines is the more important question: why are the processes themselves not accessible by default? The goal shouldn't be exceptional people clearing exceptional hurdles. It should be systems that work for everyone, as a matter of course.

Thank you for taking the time to read the twenty-second edition of AccessPoint. We hope you enjoy watching the Oscars this weekend as much as you’ve enjoyed reading this.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from February 27 to March 13.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. First Supreme Court-approved withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment- The Supreme Court in Harish Rana v. Union of India allowed withdrawal of all life-sustaining treatment, including clinically assisted nutrition and hydration (CANH), for a 32-year-old who has been in a persistent vegetative state since 2013. While the Court first recognised passive euthanasia in Aruna Shanbaug (2011), this marks the first time it has actually authorised such withdrawal in a specific case. The bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Viswanathan directed AIIMS to implement a palliative end-of-life care plan ensuring the process is managed with dignity.

2. Government moves to simplify disability certificates for exams- The government has directed all service examination authorities to accept a common standardised certificate format for candidates seeking writing-related accommodations (scribe/extra time), instead of requiring separate exam-specific certificates each time. Separately, in Mahendra Sabharu Majhi v. M/s Mahlaxmi Enterprises, the Bombay High Court held that an Employees' Compensation claim cannot be rejected solely because the disability certificate was issued by a qualified doctor who did not originally treat the injured worker, reinforcing that access to rights must not turn on hyper-technical objections to certification.

   

3. Supreme Court questions gap in disability law on acid attacks- In Shaheen Malik v. Union of India, the Supreme Court agreed that if Section 124 of the BNS treats both "throwing" and "administering" acid as punishable forms of the offence, the RPwD Act cannot continue to recognise only those attacked by acid being thrown. This gap currently leaves survivors of forced acid ingestion outside disability certification, compensation, and rehabilitation frameworks.

4. Kerala High Court clarifies testimony of persons with intellectual disabilities- The Kerala High Court has clarified that a prosecution does not automatically fail just because investigators did not record a victim’s intellectual disability. The Court held that the omission is not fatal where the victim is still found competent to testify and capable of giving rational answers, making the ruling significant for how courts assess evidence in cases involving persons with intellectual disabilities.

   

5. New data shows gender gap in disability certification- Recent data from the UDID dashboard shows over 13.5 million disability certificates issued, with significant gender disparities in registration. Of these, 8.9 million were issued to men and 4.5 million to women, while only 2,342 certificates were recorded for transgender persons. The gap raises continuing questions about gendered access to disability certification, welfare schemes, and formal recognition within administrative systems.

6. Maharashtra launches new portal for disability welfare schemes-The Government of Maharashtra launched the Divyang Sahayak Portal, describing it as India's first fully integrated digital platform designed exclusively for persons with disabilities. The portal acts as a one-stop window where persons with disabilities can identify eligible schemes, apply online, track applications in real time, and access services through a paperless interface linked to UDID and Aadhaar, reflecting a broader push to reduce the procedural fragmentation that often makes welfare access difficult in practice.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Parents flag barriers for PwD learners, request NIOS to undertake urgent policy reforms

2. Gujarat: New Braille science magazine aims to make STEM inclusive

3. St. Mary’s Rehabilitation University Established in Hyderabad, Pioneering India’s First Integrated Rehabilitation Ecosystem

4. AP to Start Free Bus Facility for Persons With Disabilities From March 18, 2026

5. High transport costs, low support: The daily toll on commuters with disabilities

6. PwD Commission seeks report from Tamil Nadu govt in 15 days on Nanguneri killings

7. BAFTA controversy highlights missed conversation on Tourette syndrome

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organisation that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the twenty-first edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

On 19th February, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, attendees witnessed a moment that signalled a shift in the disability rights landscape. Center stage, alongside the Prime Minister, was an animated digital avatar—an AI-driven, real-time sign language translator. While such digital avatars are not yet perfect—a major critique from the Deaf community is that they often miss the facial expressions critical to Indian Sign Language (ISL) interpretation—the technology is evolving at a fast pace.

The implications of such tools are profound. Imagine a Deaf person walking into a grocery store or interacting with colleagues at a workplace with ease. In many environments where it may not currently make "economic sense" to hire a full-time interpreter, AI can bridge the gap. More importantly, it offers autonomy in deeply private moments. We must acknowledge the struggle of a Deaf person seeking mental health support when their only interpreter is a family member, or those moments of isolation where human interpreters assume a joke is "unimportant" and fail to translate it. While AI will inevitably disrupt jobs, we cannot ignore the immense empowerment it creates by returning agency to the individual.

We at The Quantum Hub (TQH) were also at the AI Impact Summit, where I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on Inclusive AI for Persons with Disabilities, featuring Manmeet Nanda (DEPwD), Prof. Alison Noble (The Royal Society, UK), Tukaram Mundhe (GoM), Amar Jain (Mission Accessibility), Andrew Fleming (British High Commissioner to East and North East India), and Agastya Mehta (Meta)—spanning everything from enforceable accessibility standards and co-design to AI-enabled service delivery, independence at scale, adaptive learning, and the privacy–accessibility trade-off. Our learnings from the Summit were unanimous—that this untapped market power can only be leveraged when tech solutions are carefully designed for the end user.

On the ground, AI has already started empowering PwDs. Projects such as AIIMS’ distribution of Smart Vision Glasses, and the recognition of DigiLocker disability IDs for public transport reflect growing experimentation with digital solutions.

Yet, these developments must be viewed through the lens of lived experience. Technology can reduce friction, but without strong privacy safeguards, digital literacy support, and accessibility-by-design, it risks becoming a new gatekeeper rather than an enabler. The shift from physical disability passes to DigiLocker-based bus IDs, for instance, streamlines verification but also raises questions around data protection and exclusion for those with limited digital access.

As identity and entitlements migrate online, accessibility standards and privacy protections must evolve alongside innovation. Courts have already indicated that digital systems must account for disability-related barriers; innovation cannot be detached from rights.

This is where the idea of techno-ableism—the assumption that technology, by its mere presence, resolves inequality, warrants attention—not as a rejection of innovation, but as a reminder that technology cannot be a substitute for structural reform. In our rush to innovate, we risk treating technology as a “fix for disability”, and thus a substitute for concrete change, rather than acknowledging it for what it is: a mere tool for equity.

India’s AI moment is here and it offers a real opportunity. The challenge is to ensure that innovation strengthens the broader movement for dignity and equal participation—and that inclusion is designed into systems from the outset, rather than layered on afterwards.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from February 13 to February 26.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. A decade of the RPwD Act- Ten years after the RPwD Act, we have a disability rights framework, public awareness and a momentum on disability inclusion. Yet, challenges persist–in the lack of granular data, inaccessible public infrastructure, and high dropout rates among children with special needs (CWSN). Institutions meant to secure PwDs’ welfare remain without office-bearers for 7 years. Courts continue to use ableist language even while upholding disability rights and issuing guidance on inclusive language. Association of People with Disability (APD) and IIM Bangalore’s Resource Book on accessibility aims to bridge these gaps in implementation.

   

2. Courts and Accountability: Key Legal Developments- In significant rulings on military disability benefits, the Supreme Court upheld soldiers’ entitlement to disability pensions with full arrears, removing the earlier three-year limitation. The High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh likewise rejected the Centre’s attempt to deny disability pension in cases involving schizophrenia. Separately, the Supreme Court is set to review the UPSC’s compliance with screen-reader accessibility requirements under the RPwD Act, while the Delhi High Court has directed the government to take a decision within six months on granting GST exemption for adult clinical diapers.

3. Education: Access, Accommodation, and Governance- Recent developments signal a renewed push toward inclusive education. The Goa government has announced monthly financial assistance for students with disabilities pursuing higher education, reflecting stronger institutional backing. In Tamil Nadu, proposed revisions to scribe rules would permit college students and volunteers to serve as scribes for candidates appearing in examinations, potentially easing access barriers. Meanwhile, in Delhi, amendments to the RTE Rules restructuring School Management Committees seek to mandate representation of parents of children with specific disabilities, strengthening parent-led, disability-inclusive governance within schools.

   

4. Protest and Rights-Based Advocacy: Demands for Dignity and Delivery- Persons with disabilities continued to stage protests across states, including outside the Siliguri SDO office, demanding enhanced monthly assistance. In Chennai, members of TARATDAC and other disability rights groups have demonstrated for over a week, seeking an increase in financial support. These developments, coupled with concerns about the underutilisation of disability funds, point to persistent implementation gaps, even as the 2026 Budget prominently highlighted disability-related commitments. Protesters in Chennai also alleged police manhandling of a disability rights activist.

   On a more positive note, the Delhi government extended health coverage to persons with disabilities under the Ayushman Bharat Health Scheme, marking a meaningful step toward social protection.

   ---

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Next census to include those with neuro disability: Manmeet Nanda, DEPwD

2. Shikhar Dhawan Foundation’s Livelihood On Wheels Enables ₹33 Lakh Earnings For Specially-Abled Individuals

3. AJEEVIKA, a career counselling session for Persons with Disabilities was organised by CDRT, Kirori Mal College, in collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Indian Railways and IndiGo

4. Kerala Cabinet approves India’s first comprehensive elderly care policy

5. Kerala to launch first model Assistive Village for children with disabilities in Malappuram

6. ‘No one has the right’: Why Madras HC denied relief to parents in 9-year-old daughter’s poisoning case

7. Periyar Tiger reserve launches project for kids with autism

   ---

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organisation that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the twentieth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

On the evening of 31st January 2026, I was pinged with a poll on Disability WhatsApp groups, “How many times will disability be mentioned in the Union Budget 2026?” The options that were presented were 0, 1, and 2. Not surprising. Governments might change, Finance Ministers might be swapped. But disability, unfortunately, only finds a token mention in budgets.

Budget 2026 marked a visible shift and gave us a pleasant surprise. For the first time, disability was not a passing reference but part of the economic narrative. Two new schemes were announced. The first, Divyangjan Kaushal Yojana, seeks to focus on skilling persons with disabilities. A welcome scheme, but the challenge will only begin now. India does have a wide variety of non-profits working on skilling. Persons with disabilities get certificates but no job in the end. With the government now involved, it would be integral to bring in industry so that this is just not another certificate producing activity, but one that actually leads to employment.

The other scheme announced was Divyang Sahara Yojana that proposes modernisation of Artificial Limbs Manufacturing Corporation of India (ALIMCO) with an allocation of ₹100 crore to enable affordable assistive devices at scale. ALIMCO in the past has received flak for not having improved its product quality with time. One does hope this investment enables better-quality products. However, there are many in the sector who feel it might have been better utilised in subsidising private sector manufacturers. It would be interesting to see how the scheme pans out.

Allocations for the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities have increased by 29.3 percent to ₹1,669.72 crore. Mental health received significant attention, including the announcement of National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS-2) in North India and upgrades to regional institutions.

These are important signals. They suggest that disability is being seen not merely through a welfare lens, but as part of workforce participation, manufacturing, care infrastructure and economic growth. In a Budget that emphasised MSMEs, infrastructure and technology, there is an opportunity to embed accessibility into mainstream economic planning. But skilling must lead to employment through industry partnerships.

At the same time, structural gaps remain. Under the old Income Tax regime, Sections 80U and 80DD provided for a flat deduction of ₹75,000 to ₹1,25,000 for persons with disabilities and disabled dependents. Unfortunately, they are unavailable under the new tax regime. Allocations under Scheme for Implementation of Persons with Disabilities Act (SIPDA) have been reduced despite its wide mandate spanning accessibility and the UDID ecosystem. GST Rebates on assistive devices continue to be an evasive discussion and the office of the Chief Commissioner for PwDs continues to be vacant.

Similarly, the recent unfortunate incident at Delhi’s Sundar Nursery, where a child was disrespected and denied access to a swing because of a perceived mental disability, highlights the insensitivity that persists despite public commitments to inclusion. Even as policy speaks of empowerment, the built environment often communicates exclusion.

This disconnect is instructive. Budget 2026 has broken a threshold by bringing disability into the economic conversation. It aligns with the broader understanding of the purple economy, where PwDs are seen as workers, entrepreneurs and consumers shaping markets and innovation. But economic visibility must be accompanied by everyday respect.

This Budget offers a foundation. The task ahead is to ensure that inclusion is not episodic but structural, not symbolic but systemic. Only then will policy intent translate into lived equality.

Thank you for taking the time to read the twentieth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you find this edition thoughtful and grounded in the realities it seeks to highlight.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

Parliamentary Questions Tracker

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from January 28 to February 12.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Education: Rights and Inequities: The recently reported sexual abuse of deaf and visually impaired students at a residential school in Odisha highlights critical gaps in safeguarding and oversight within state-aided institutions. Courts, meanwhile, continued to clarify the scope of inclusive education. The Madras High Court intervened to secure a disabled law student’s right to education, holding that fee waivers for persons with disabilities should not be contingent on admission under the disability quota and must be implemented as a welfare measure. Judicial directions to CBSE also ensured appropriate assistive support for a Class X student with a learning disorder, reinforcing that examination access must align with statutory obligations under the RPwD Act.

   

2. Competitive exams and inclusion: Despite a Central Administrative Tribunal order directing reservation for persons with specific learning and certain mental disabilities in the Civil Services Examination, the 2026 notification omitted such reservation and the ruling was challenged by the Union. Separately, CBSE’s new CTET 2026 guidelines allow PwD candidates to meet assigned scribes for a 20-minute suitability interaction, violating DEPwD guidelines that are in force that allowed them their own scribe. In contrast, UPSC revised its exam centre allocation framework to prioritise closer and more accessible centres for candidates with benchmark disabilities, addressing logistical barriers in competitive examinations.

3. Electoral Processes and Accessibility: Incidents from across states highlight barriers to political participation for PwDs. In West Bengal, reports indicated that persons with disabilities were made to wait in queues during Special Intensive Revision (SIR) hearings despite Election Commission directives on accessible procedures, exposing implementation gaps in electoral verification. In Indore, a voter and his visually impaired mother had to travel to administrative offices to re-establish his identity after his name was deleted during roll revision.

   

4. Towards inclusive tech regulation: In response to rising concern over AI-generated deepfakes, the Government of India has notified amendments to the IT Rules, 2021, to operationalise a regulatory framework for synthetically generated information (SGI). In a significant step towards inclusion, the amendments exempt any editing towards enhancing accessibility that does not manipulate the core information - example, adding subtitles to a pre-recorded press conference. The exemption for enhancing accessibility of information is a significant step towards enabling inclusive content moderation for persons with disabilities. Similarly, The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting has issued the finalised accessibility guidelines for OTT platforms, mandating features like captions, audio descriptions, and Indian Sign Language, along with compliance reporting and grievance mechanisms to ensure inclusive access. However, criticisms from the sector highlight that the guidelines call for a phased implementation upon the expiry of 3 years, which exceeds the timeline of 2 years stipulated by Section 46 of the RPwD Act. Besides, these guidelines were not notified under Rule 15 of the RPwD Rules, giving them little teeth for enforcement.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Medicine Tree’ Of Syringes And Bottles By Kerala Man Tells Story Of Daughter’s Decade-Long Treatment

2. Why a Budget proposal to roll back a century-old tax exemption has sparked anger among military veterans

3. In a first, a visually challenged woman all set to become a judge in Kerala

4. Disabled persons’ group protests Union budget in Madurai

5. Father identified as disabled daughter’s rapist after 16 men DNA-tested

6. How Kozhikode Is Rewriting Disability Governance

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the nineteenth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

This week, a chilling headline from Uttar Pradesh serves as a grim portal into the desperation bred by our current system: a NEET aspirant allegedly amputated his own foot in a bid to qualify for the disability quota. While the act itself is extreme, it unmasks a deeper, systemic problem. In a country where historically disability has been a site of social stigma, we are seeing a shift where limited resources and hyper-competition are driving people toward drastic, irreversible measures to avail welfare benefits.

We have seen the fallout of the Puja Khedkar case and the subsequent alleged misuse of quotas leading to massive re-verification orders in Maharashtra and Rajasthan. But this is the first reported instance of someone apparently choosing to become disabled for a quota. It is a scary precedent. Its significance lies not only in its extremity, but in the risk it poses of triggering a broader, suspicion-driven witch-hunt—where PwDs are subjected to heightened scrutiny and repeatedly required to justify the legitimacy of their disability status.

This brings us to a fundamental question. What is disability? The law often treats disability as a static, biological fact—a “check-the-box” exercise of medical percentages. But the reality is fluid, and our legal definitions are struggling to keep up. Take the RPwD Act’s definition of blindness: if you are blind in one eye but the other is functional, the law does not consider you as a person with a benchmark disability, thus denying you reservation and other welfare benefits. You are functionally binocularly-impaired in a 3D-oriented world, yet legally "abled" by a system that prioritises clinical acuity over lived experience. This rigidity becomes even more apparent in the PIL filed by Shaheen Malik, which highlights how acid-attack survivors who are forced to ingest acid and suffer severe internal injuries are excluded from recognition under the RPwD Act because the law privileges visible impairments—leaving those with invisible, life-altering harm outside the ambit of disability benefits.

These gaps extend to persons with recognised blood disorders such as thalassemia and haemophilia. Although these conditions are included under the RPwD Act, individuals affected by them often remain outside the scope of reservation benefits in education and employment due to the way eligibility and medical fitness criteria are applied. As a result, they are frequently deemed “medically unfit” for jobs or higher education, effectively leaving them without meaningful protection despite formal recognition under the RPwD Act.

This form of definitional gatekeeping creates gaps in who is recognised and protected under the law. In West Bengal, we see the state’s 100-point roster restricting reservations for specific posts to only certain sub-categories of locomotor disability, effectively shutting out others in direct violation of the RPwD Act.

The buck cannot stop at definitions. Reasonable accommodation must evolve alongside our conceptualization of disability. The landmark victory of Sanju Pal in the United Kingdom, an Indian-origin professional who challenged her dismissal linked to endometriosis, is a bellwether for this shift. It forces us to ask again: What is disability?

If we continue to view disability as a static, medical "worth," we will continue to see people take desperate measures to fit into our narrow boxes. It is time our policies moved from measuring how much someone is disabled to how well our society accommodates the diversity of the human body.

Thank you for taking the time to read the nineteenth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you find this edition thoughtful and grounded in the realities it seeks to highlight. We are especially grateful to the Mariwala Health Initiative for coming on board as a part funder. Their support enables us to sustain and scale this work, and to continue deepening conversations on disability, policy, and inclusion.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This newsletter is supported, in part, by Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI), a grant-making organisation that advances inclusive, rights-based approaches to mental health by centring lived experience and examining mental health within its wider social and structural contexts.

If you’re interested in supporting this work, please reach out to us at office@thequantumhub.com

This edition captures the key updates from January 16 to January 29.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Reasonable Accommodations: Narrowly interpreted standards of reasonable accommodation continue to exclude persons with disabilities from education and employment. Barriers in law entrance examinations—through rigid eligibility criteria and inconsistent accommodations e.g., visually intensive questions—illustrate how access is constrained at the entry point to professional pathways. Courts, however, are pushing back against such exclusions. Last week, the Delhi High Court rejected the categorisation of hypertension as a mere “lifestyle disorder” to deny disability pension, while the Punjab and Haryana High Court held that disability cannot be used to deny service protection following a brain haemorrhage.

2. Social Security and inclusive policies: Government and regulatory bodies are increasingly relying on digitised tracking and expanded grievance mechanisms to strengthen social safety nets. While Delhi recorded over 1,000 applications under its high-support caretaker allowance, signalling unmet care needs, Uttar Pradesh announced a centralised disability data system to monitor service delivery. The RBI’s Integrated Ombudsman Scheme, 2026 further broadens complaint mechanisms by introducing a separate category for persons with disabilities, creating clearer avenues to challenge inaccessible banking infrastructure and discriminatory practices.

   

3. Health, Care & Social Protection - In Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchi district, healthcare services were extended to over 57,000 persons with disabilities, reflecting progress in district-level service delivery. At the national level, calls for expanded disability screening by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan emphasised early identification, but also underscored persistent concerns around referral pathways, follow-up care, and support systems beyond diagnosis.

4. Infrastructure & Accessibility Incidents - New national lift standards for persons with disabilities signal a move towards embedding accessibility into infrastructure design, with implications for both public and private buildings. Their importance was underscored by a viral incident in Mumbai, where a wheelchair user was told to “walk home” after a lift malfunctioned, exposing the fragility of access reliant on poorly maintained infrastructure. Initiatives such as Kottayam’s library-based inclusive innovation hub and proposals for accessible redesign of Mysuru’s Bogadi Road junction further reflect growing engagement with universal design principles.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Historic India-England Mixed Disability T20I Series Set to Launch from January 29

2. NRAI Bengaluru Chapter to Host Inclusion & Knowledge Evening on Disability-Inclusive Employment in F&B

3. Seven teachers suspended over fake disability certificates in Maharashtra’s Nanded - The Times of India

4. Fake Disability Certificates Used for ST Bus Travel to Invite Criminal Action in Maharashtra

5. AI accessibility: Use India’s AI Summit to define it clearly and set a mandate for the world to adopt

6. Why making live events accessible for people with disabilities makes sense for everyone

7. Safety still out of reach: Everyday struggles of women with disabilities - Citizen Matters

8. Namma Metro commuters seek better grievance redressal

9. Higher Education Equity Rules Stayed, Affecting Disability Protections

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Welcome to the eighteenth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

The first two weeks of the new year have arrived with grim reminders of how deeply inaccessible everyday life remains for persons with disabilities (PwDs). For the community especially, the jarring news from Delhi’s Saket Court—where work pressures drove a court staffer with a 60% physical disability to take his own life—has been deeply troubling. It should also be noted that the judiciary remains outside the RPwD Act’s workplace protections and grievance redressal mechanisms, leaving little institutional space to acknowledge distress. In Salem, Tamil Nadu, a woman with a disability attempted self-immolation after repeated struggles to access housing, compounded by harsh responses from authorities and insensitive suggestions from neighbours. In Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, a student with a physical disability was assaulted and subjected to casteist slurs for a slight delay in reaching class. These are not isolated incidents. They point to a widening gap between inclusive policies on paper and lived access on the ground, alongside a persistent absence of social, legal, and psychological recourse.

Mental health struggles among PwDs are inseparable from structural barriers to housing, work, healthcare, and dignity. Access gaps also vary: a Deaf person may lack counselling without sign language interpretation, while someone with a locomotor disability may be unable to reach a therapist. Compounding this, narratives of “strength” and “inspiration” surrounding PwDs often suppress vulnerability and help-seeking.

A study done by the Mariwala Health Initiative notes that many PwDs are so preoccupied with managing everyday marginalisation and functional difficulty that mental health becomes secondary. Often, the cause of distress for a PwD is social or societal, rather than a disease or disorder. Addressing this requires more than targeted interventions for psychosocial disabilities alone. An interesting intervention is the Buddy Up network launched by parents of two neurodiverse kids who wanted to make friends. They are trying to tackle social isolation faced by PwDs and their caregivers by connecting them to each other to create a sense of community.

But the roots of disconnect within the PwD community lie deeper than just isolation. There is a perception in some quarters that disability is gamed to benefit from the system (read Puja Khedkar), aggravating stress on PwDs who have to ‘prove’ their disability again and again. The fact that most Indian companies hire less than 1% of PwDs despite the diversity hype is telling of the normalization of ableism in workplaces. Not only do such practices diminish PwDs, they rob mental healthcare techniques of a much needed exposure to lived experiences centred around disability. This vicious cycle can only be broken, when psychosocial disabilities and the larger disability experience are viewed from an oppression perspective, instead of a medical one. Perhaps, a good place to start would be to trust PwDs for their own experiences - the sessions court’s reliance on the testimony of a woman with an intellectual disability to sentence her rapist to rigorous imprisonment is one such telling example.

Thank you for taking the time to read the eighteenth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you find this edition thoughtful and grounded in the realities it seeks to highlight.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures the key updates from December 29 to January 15.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Social Security & welfare: In a set of significant social security developments, the Supreme Court revised compensation for a road accident victim by recalculating loss of income to more accurately reflect the impact of disability. The Punjab High Court held that armed forces personnel who acquire a disability after enlistment are entitled to disability pension benefits. In addition, the Haryana High Court ruled employees with at least 40% disability cannot be denied conveyance allowance.

   

2. Rights, Representation & Advocacy - Closing the Justice Gap: Legal mechanisms are shifting from theory to action. Maharashtra became the first state to notify SOPs under Section 7 of the RPwD Act, finally formalising a mechanism for authorities to address abuse and violence against PwDs. The Supreme Court has reinforced this shift by introducing priority listing for disability-related cases, recognising delay as injustice. Yet critical gaps remain. The Delhi High Court’s appointment of a wife as guardian for a comatose man was an interesting step but highlighted the gaps that continue to exist in the Act’s “limited guardianship” framework, which prioritises agency but has no mechanism in how guardians are appointed. This structural failure was echoed by the Goa High Court, which flagged inaccessible court procedures as a direct violation of Section 12 of the RPwD Act and equal access to justice.

3. Education, Where Innovation is meeting Institutional Inertia: World Braille Day sparked pedagogical progress, with Uttar Pradesh launching its first Braille library housing 4,000 books and Jadavpur University reimagining inclusion through a tactile literary card game. Chennai also expanded learning horizons with a new multi-skill sensory park. However, systemic cracks remain visible. In Maharashtra, Secretary Tukaram Mundhe flagged a critical imbalance: the state spends ₹1,100 crore annually on special schools for 38,000 students, whereas 2.5 lakh students in mainstream education receive a scholarship of only ₹100 per month. Similarly, while Karnataka now permits computers for visually impaired students in exams, the requirement for students to arrange their own devices reveals a troubling trend: treating accessibility as a private burden rather than a state responsibility.

   

4. The Quota Conundrum in Industry: A complex negotiation is unfolding between rights-based mandates and business realities. NASSCOM’s feedback on the proposed Karnataka Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Employment and Education Bill 2025 reflects this tension. While welcoming the bill's intent, the industry body has flagged significant concerns regarding the proposed 5% private sector quota, citing ambiguous definitions, lack of compliance clarity, and a potential implementation burden.

5. Mainstreaming Inclusion: Media houses are increasingly tapping into disability marketing, with 48% of Indian consumers wishing for more inclusive advertising. Concerns about gimmicks and tokenism remain, but brands like McDonald’s and Cadbury are already leading the way. In a similar vein, media narratives are seeing a positive shift in disability reporting.

   

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Draft RPwD (Amendment) Rules 2025 amending Rules 22 and 38 of RPwD Rules 2017 issued for public consultation

2. Supreme Court directs Coal India Ltd to treat inclusion of disabled persons as an advantage

3. After ThePrint report on 9-yr-old paraplegic boy’s court battle for dad’s transfer, ray of hope from HC

4. Kerala’s Sahamitra Initiative aims to make Kozhikode fully disability-friendly district

5. Bihar To Recruit 5,500 Librarians, 7,500 Posts Reserved For Persons With Disabilities

6. UP steps up comprehensive rehabilitation for persons with disabilities

7. Punjab & Haryana HC asks state to re-examine superannuation extension solely given on the basis of disability

8. Telangana Chief Minister calls support for disabled a humanitarian duty

9. Able bodied people forging PwD IDs and securing govt aid: TARATDAC

10. Age And Disability Are No Obstacles For These Gorakhpur Shooters

11. True equality at the workplace only when disability rights are core part of CSR: Supreme Court

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter (wow, we are thirty four weeks old already?) for all news related to disability and policy.

Every fortnight for 17 editions now, we have brought to you legislative changes, court rulings, executive decisions, and policy debates — at both the central and state levels — with a sharp focus on how they impact Persons with Disabilities. And while you might have enjoyed reading my editorials, it is an entire team that makes AccessPoint what AccessPoint is and ensures it reaches your inbox every second Friday. Harshita Kumari, who not only ensured invisible disabilities get their fair share but put pen to paper at AccessPoint and otherwise to highlight the care economy. Tithi Neogi, who had enough of my fascination with Samay Raina to write an article about Free Speech Moderation. Suyashi Smridhi with whom I have argued every second Thursday as she cut off half my article for being too long - she is invariably always right, not that I will accept it. Pranav Rao deserves a special mention for the design and slickness with which AccessPoint reaches its readers. And of course, the new edition to our team Samika Dandge who has worked through her holiday to ensure this edition, as well, reaches you right on time for the new year. Credit is due to Jayashankar Vengathattil and Shubham Mudgil who played an integral role in the initial set up. Finally, thanks to Rohit Kumar, the founder of TQH, who personally pre reads each edition, giving rich policy perspectives while balancing how to make it more accessible to our readers.

The last year has been an eventful one in the space of disability. We have seen disability reach the cultural map, whether it's through universal access at Durga Pujas, commercial films like Sitaare Zameen Par, concerts like Coldplay that put access first to Mattel’s first Barbie with Type 1 diabetes. However, the more things change, the more they remain the same. A political leader’s recent open attack at a visually impaired woman during a Christmas lunch in a school reflected how layered and deep the stigmas around persons with disabilities remain — shunned from empathy and rituals due to their perceived “karmic flaws”, and attacked for being “traitors” if partaking in celebrations seen as “Christian”.

Statistically though, PwDs, particularly those with invisible disabilities, remain in obscurity due to underreporting, narrow definitions, and weak data infrastructures. The forthcoming Census in 2027, thus presents a critical opportunity to correct long-standing gaps in disability enumeration and capture the prevalence of invisible disabilities. The good news is that the obscurity of PwDs is beginning to crack online — from correcting the misclassification of PwDs as children under the DPDP Rules to pushing for OTT Accessibility Guidelines — marking a shift towards recognising PwDs as independent digital users.

Aside from obscurity, PwDs also bear the burden of proving themselves — even in 2025, a year since the Pooja Khedkar debacle. We have seen an increased lack of faith in existing certifications, whether it's the mandatory rollout of UDID in Maharashtra despite backlogs and staff shortages, or the new Svavalamban verification SOPs which risk deepening exclusion—especially for women and persons with rare or invisible disabilities.

At the same time, we have seen marked progress from certain states — be it Tamil Nadu’s reforms in political participation of PwDs in local bodies (as we covered in the 16th edition), Goa’s Purple Fest, and rehabilitation efforts in Uttar Pradesh.

However, representation gaps persist. For most PwDs, healthcare remains uninsured and inaccessible, while justice and fair trial continue to feel out of reach as courts, prisons, and police stations remain ill-equipped and poorly informed about disability rights. Against this backdrop, the Supreme Court’s year-end move to enforce timelines for arguments and prioritise disability cases marks a significant shift. Looking to 2026, accessibility in the justice system must become the norm, not the exception. As courts digitise, access must be built in by design, alongside long-overdue custodial and legal aid reforms that centre psychosocial and intellectual disabilities.

The last year has been eventful for us as well. We launched the Breaking Barriers fellowship with the DEPwD, authored a report with Zoom on Reasonable Accommodations in the Workplace, worked on accessibility in Digital Public Infrastructure, while advocating for more autonomy for PwDs in the DPDP Rules. In 2026, we will hit the ground running by kickstarting a coalition to advocate for disability rights, and launching exciting work on inclusive technology in the run-up to the AI Impact Summit that India is hosting in February. Stay tuned for the details!

Thank you for taking the time to read the seventeenth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

In the spirit of the special edition, we would like to leave you with some books and movie recommendations that the team has curated.

In this year-end edition, we highlight the most significant updates on disability from 2025.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Developments under the RPwD Act: Courts played a decisive role this year in expanding and enforcing the RPwD Act. The Supreme Court signalled a broader reading of disability by questioning the exclusion of persons with haemophilia from job reservations under Section 34 and challenging barriers to PwDs’ upward mobility into unreserved posts. The Delhi High Court barred diversion of reserved posts, while Project Ability Empowerment and a Kerala High Court ruling on limited guardianship strengthened institutional accountability and autonomy.

   

2. Banking and Financial Access: Anchal Bhateja’s challenge to ICICI Bank spotlighted how inaccessible digital platforms erode financial autonomy for persons with disabilities. The Supreme Court’s mandate for barrier-free banking—reinforced by an RBI compliance circular—marked a significant shift, while the Delhi High Court expanded the frame by recognising the need for accessible currency. Despite innovations like Aadhaar-based face authentication, meaningful financial inclusion remains constrained by deeper structural barriers, including persistently low literacy levels among PwDs.

3. Housing Rights and Secure Tenure: Housing emerged as a key access frontier this year. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs reserved 4% of central government housing for PwDs and reaffirmed, in Parliament, the 5% reservation under Section 37 of the RPwD Act, with priority for women—linked to PMAY allocations and SIPDA funding. Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore project offered a stronger rights-based model, delivering 86 purpose-built homes, including 16 for spinal cord injury survivors.

4. Disability and the Private Sector: Karnataka’s proposal to mandate reservation for PwDs in private establishments marked a shift from voluntary inclusion to regulatory obligation. Industry-facing platforms like Purple Fest highlighted emerging efforts around technical integration and accessibility innovation. At the level of product design, initiatives such as Maruti Suzuki’s optional swivel seat reflected incremental progress, while also underscoring how accessibility in the private sector remains largely voluntary, fragmented, and market-driven rather than rights-based.

   

5. Employment, Accommodation, and the Right to Work: Courts and ministries reshaped employment access for persons with disabilities this year. The Supreme Court struck down disability-based retirement distinctions and stayed Uttarakhand’s exclusion of blind and locomotor disability candidates from judicial services, while the Himachal Pradesh High Court upheld extended retirement for employees acquiring benchmark disabilities. Revised scribe guidelines, deferred technology-first exam reforms, UPSC’s move toward screen-reader integration, and NMC’s interim PwBD admission norms reflected ongoing friction in assessment regimes. Yet PwDs remain only ~1% of central government employees, well below the 4% mandate.

6. Education and Inclusion: Education policy saw steady progress toward inclusion this year. Assam introduced Indian Sign Language at Class XI, Goa announced modified board exams and ITI equivalence for students with intellectual disabilities, and Chandigarh released its first comprehensive special education policy. Entry-level barriers were tackled through Haryana’s guidelines prohibiting schools from denying admission to CWSN, reinforced by the Delhi High Court’s order to readmit a student with autism, affirming inclusive education as a fundamental right.

   

These are some additional updates from 2025, we thought you might like:

Access to Public Infrastructure and Spaces

1. Braille signage in Indian Railways coaches marks progress, but accessibility challenges persist.

2. Railways Directed To Retrofit Stations For PwD Accessibility Compliance

3. Inclusive park for children with disabilities inaugurated in Coimbatore

4. Goa pushed initiatives on accessible tourism and inclusive public spaces

Transport, Mobility and the Right to Movement

1. Draft framework proposes sweeping changes to transport systems for persons with disabilities

2. DGCA calls on airlines over wheelchair accessibility issue

3. Maharashtra’s draft rules for app-based transport aggregators mandate accessibility features for PwDs.

Assistive Technology & Tech Governance

1. Government proposes portal to streamline certification, access to assistive tech

2. DEPwD released Draft ICT Accessibility Standards to guide digital accessibility across platforms and services.

3. Towards Accessible Telecom Services: DoT Implements Pragya Prasun Directives For PwDs

Cadets with disabilities and the Right to Livelihood

1. Supreme Court takes suo motu cognisance of plight of cadets suffering disability during military training

2. Need a scheme to help boarded out cadets: SC

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the sixteenth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

This edition marks the closure of the Winter session of the Parliament – a period meant for responsive deliberation from our elected representatives on some topical issues. It’s also that time of the year when air pollution becomes impossible to ignore. While several leaders have shared their takes on addressing the rising AQI levels, their silence on including persons with disabilities in these plans is ubiquitous. Persons with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by air pollution, and climate change-induced risks, yet, we do not feature prominently in any action plans.

The absence of PwDs from the narrative around pollution is reflected in the lack of disability-preparedness in our disaster risk reduction plans. The response to a question about disability-inclusive disaster management in Parliament revealed that the government lacks details on accessible disaster shelters and emergency relief centres, and mock exercises have limited disability-inclusion. These patterns of omission were repeated in the Parliament – responses to questions raised in this session revealed several critical gaps, across themes of access in education, housing, disability ID and rehabilitation. A detailed list of disability-related questions raised in the Winter Parliament Session can be found here.

These problems are telling of the absence of voices that represent disability in our administrative and political spaces. The fresh appointments made from across states and the disability sector to the National Trust for Welfare of PwDs is a start in the right direction. Responses in the Parliament too, highlighted some positive measures – the ARJUN portal for raising online requests for assistive aids, and NALSA’s Manonyay scheme for mental illness and intellectual disabilities are some crucial interventions.

At the state level, the nomination of two persons with disabilities to Chennai’s City Corporation Council marks a shift from political assurances to meaningful participation. Building on this moment, we feature our second guest editorial by Professor T. M. N. Deepak — Secretary of the Persons with Disabilities Wing, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and President of the December 3 Movement — who reflects on why disability advocacy must move beyond charity and rights-based claims toward direct political participation.

Thank you for taking the time to read the sixteenth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures the key updates from December 5 to December 19, 2025.

From Charity Model to Direct Power: Why Politics of Disability Must Enter the State by Prof. T.M.N. Deepak

The disability movement in India has travelled a long arc, from charity to rights through legal activism. This trajectory echoes the global commitment articulated in the Incheon Strategy — “Nothing About Us Without Us.” Yet today, we are increasingly told that rights-based recognition is enough. It is not. Social work, court victories, and protests have been necessary — I have been part of them. However, they are insufficient on their own. Rights without political participation do not travel far. Laws may exist on paper, but unless Persons with Disabilities(PwDs) enter political institutions, claim representation, and participate in decision-making, implementation will remain uncertain. Otherwise, decisions will continue to be taken about us, rather than with us.

Over time, I realised that legal victories alone cannot deliver justice; implementation lies with those who govern. “The Supreme Court may order, but who will execute?” is not a rhetorical question — it compelled a strategic shift. I chose direct political participation over litigation because entering institutions, not merely arguing before them, is the only way to make rights real.

Ableism is often deliberately embedded in law. Section 33(3) of the Tamil Nadu Panchayat Raj Act barred Deaf persons from contesting elections — and almost no one questioned it. In 2011, Kavitha, a hearing-impaired woman from Villupuram, was disqualified from local elections along with nearly fifty other PwD candidates. We were told this was simply how the law functioned. We refused to accept that. Sustained advocacy led to a 2012 amendment enabling PwDs to contest elections. This was not symbolic inclusion, but the dismantling of a legal barrier that denied democratic rights.

Ableism also operates beyond electoral law, embedded in everyday governance institutions. This was evident in the Tamil Nadu Co-operative Societies Act, 1983, where eligibility norms excluded persons with disabilities from cooperative governance. In 2022, the Tamil Nadu Co-operative Societies (Fifth Amendment) Act removed these disqualifications, recognising persons with disabilities not merely as beneficiaries, but as legitimate governors of cooperative institutions.

That insight was first sharpened for me in 2012, when I attended a summit in South Korea where disabled associations negotiated political representation by demonstrating electoral strength. They were not seeking sympathy; they were bargaining power. That model shaped our approach in Tamil Nadu: establish electoral viability first, then demand inclusion. In 2021, the December 3 Movement fielded 49 candidates, ten of whom won — proving that disabled candidates are not symbolic, but winnable.

Political participation, however, is only the first step. The next frontier of the movement must be politicisation. Participation secures entry into institutions; politicisation transforms them by making disability a site of entitlement and negotiation. The 2021 Panchayat elections illustrate this clearly. Tamilarasi A., an independent candidate with an 80 per cent locomotor disability, encountered barriers at the Panchayat office where candidates gathered to select election symbols. The building had no ramps; she could not enter. By the time assistance was arranged, only one symbol remained, which was allotted to her. As an official candidate, Tamilarasi had every right to demand accessibility. Politicising disability turns access from a favour into a democratic obligation.

Recent institutional gains reflect this shift. In 2025, Tamil Nadu introduced mandatory nomination of one person with disability across all Panchayat and Municipal local bodies, ensuring representation in every local governance unit. While these representatives are salaried and included in deliberations, their voting powers remain limited. It is a consultative beginning — but a crucial institutional foothold.

At its core, disability inclusion is social justice. Rights, representation, and dignity are rooted in Dravidian ideology, Ambedkarite thought, and the Self-Respect Movement. Yet social justice in India has too often been confined to caste alone. Disability must be recognised as equally central — not as welfare, but as a democratic claim. Ultimately, rights without power are fragile. To make rights real, persons with disabilities must not only enter politics, but reshape it.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. Supreme Court grants relief to widowed Army officer with a disabled kid, stays transfer

2. Supreme Court Directs UPSC to Allow Scribe Changes Till Exam Week, File Plan for Screen-Reader Rollout

3. Supreme Court Issues Notice On PIL Seeking Regulation Of Care Homes For Persons With Autism And Developmental Disabilities

4. High Court quashes ‘discriminatory’ action against CRPF man with mental illness, restores full service benefits

5. Meghalaya first state in the Northeast to embed mental well-being within its governance structure

6. Disability rights organisations, activists demand withdrawal of Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill

7. Re-Examined, Re-Verified: Maharashtra’s Humiliation of Disabled Workers

8. For women with disabilities, an inclusive India is a distant country - Business Standard

For a detailed list of disability-related questions raised in the Winter Parliament Session, click on the link below.

Questions Raised

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.

From the Director’s Desk

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of AccessPoint: Monitoring Policies, Advancing Access, your one-stop fortnightly newsletter for all news related to disability and policy.

December 3 marked World Disability Day — a day that, for me, is always both joyful and reflective. There is a moment each year when the warmth and recognition make me briefly feel like Shah Rukh himself. But once the applause fades, the day invites a harder question: what does disability really mean in the 21st century? Three ideas in particular stood out this year.

The first is that disability is often invisible. For instance, a person may appear “fine” yet be managing chronic fatigue after chemotherapy. Conditions such as cancer or MS, which move through relapse and remission, unsettle the assumption that disability is stable or predictable. The second is that disability is evolving rather than static. Autism illustrates this well: rising numbers reflect an expansion in our ability to understand and diagnose it, not a surge in incidence. As our vocabulary grows, so does recognition — and with it, opportunities for better support. But definitional progress also carries risk. Which brings me to the third idea: the definitional trap. Once the law defines disability as “X,” anything outside that boundary is harder to acknowledge. My op-ed with Harshita on haemophilia and Urvashi and Ankeet’s article on cancer and its inclusion as a disability reflect this tension clearly. These experiences challenge definitions that rely on visible, permanent impairment and remind us that disability is often lived long before it is recognised by the system.

This disconnect is evident in Maharashtra’s blanket re-verification order, which forces even people with valid UDIDs to re-prove disability before inaccessible medical boards. Recognition becomes a performance rather than a guarantee of dignity. Meanwhile, accountability remains asymmetrical: doctors and boards face little consequence for errors or delays, while persons with disabilities endure repeated scrutiny and penalties simply to establish legitimacy.

These questions of recognition and legitimacy connect directly to Constitution Day. Although the Constitution is celebrated as inclusive, disability appears only in limited, deficit-based framings — grouped with “unemployability” in the State List, mentioned alongside “old age and sickness” in Article 41, or treated as grounds for disqualification due to “infirmity.” This reflects a history of constitutional interpretation shaped without viewing disability as a site of rights. Today, persons with disabilities are actively challenging these omissions — expanding meanings and asserting their rightful place within the constitutional community.

Importantly, the Constitution provides the tools to do so, and recent rulings from the Punjab, Meghalaya and Haryana High Courts are beginning to shift the narrative by affirming that disability rights deserve the same weight as fundamental rights. Courts have relied on Articles 14, 19 and 21 to deepen disability jurisprudence — from Jeeja Ghosh, which affirmed right to dignity, to Vikash Kumar, which recognised right to reasonable accommodation, to Om Rathod, where fraternity principles facilitated inclusion and access to medical education. These cases show that while the social contract may have been written with ableist assumptions, it is not immutable. As Ambedkar reminded us, “the fight for dignity and equality does not begin in the text; it begins in the terrain of resistance.”

There’s a saying that if you aim for the moon, you may land among the stars. This World Disability Day, may we aim higher — by imagining disability explicitly within Article 15 and renewing our social contract with the state.

Thank you for taking the time to read the fifteenth edition of AccessPoint. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Warm regards,

Nipun Malhotra

Director, Disability Rights & Inclusion (TQH) | Founder, Nipman Foundation

This edition captures the key updates from November 21 to December 5.

Now let’s dive into the highlights:

1. Labour Codes 2025: Missing Provisions for People with Disabilities - The Ministry of Labour & Employment’s recent roll out of Labour Codes highlights commitment to worker equality, yet the Codes omit a critical opportunity to mandate reasonable accommodations for PwDs — such as assistive technologies, universal design, and flexible work to increase participation. Global evidence as documented in Global Policy Review of Reasonable Accommodations by TQH shows reasonable accommodations are essential for removing workplace barriers and enabling inclusive employment.

   

2. SC orders medical board review in passive euthanasia plea: The Supreme Court has asked Noida District Hospital to convene a medical board to reassess a passive euthanasia request for a 31-year-old man living with an irreversible loss of consciousness for over a decade. This second appeal by the family reopens a sensitive policy debate: while strengthening pathways for dignity under Article 21 is important, equally essential are safeguards to prevent such decisions from becoming a proxy for systemic gaps in long-term disability care.

3. Political Representation for PwDs in Tamil Nadu: City corporation councils in Chennai and Trichy have inducted PwDs as nominated members - a strong progress since Tamil Nadu passed a law, enabling representation of PwDs in its local bodies. Ranipet, in particular, shines as a beacon of inclusive political representation by nominating a disabled woman to the Panchayat Union Council, illustrating the significance of targeted policy making in paving way for inclusion.

4. Need for targeted interventions to enhance accessibility: Kerala is redacting its vote from home policy for the elderly and PwDs for the local body elections — a shift from the Lok Sabha and assembly polls. While the State Election Commission has promised priority access and necessary support on ground for PwD and elderly voters, dissenters argue that severely disabled voters would benefit from a vote from home policy. This gap between formal provisions and lived realities underscores the need for more responsive interventions, as seen in Bihar, where subsidised bus travel has supported nearly 5 lakh PwDs between 2017 and 2023.

   

5. PwDs face systemic exclusion from health insurance: A NCPEDP report finds that over 80% of Indians with disabilities remain uninsured, and more than half of applicants are rejected—often without explanation or due to disability or pre-existing conditions. This exclusion persists even as Ayushman Bharat expands to cover all citizens aged 70 and above, leaving disabled people outside universal coverage. The report’s key recommendation is clear: include all PwDs in Ayushman Bharat, without age or income criteria.

6. The Right to accessibility —a paper tiger: The Sugamya Delhi Abhiyaan Campaign envisions to make Delhi an inclusive city by 2028, with accessible built-in infrastructure. Yet, while legal mandates frame a “non-negotiable” policy for accessibility in public infrastructure, the real test lies in how this transitions into real-world accessibility. Enable India re-affirms this through a poignant short film, highlighting how the absence of ramps in most public spaces deters shoppers with mobility issues. This is mirrored for PwDs in Mumbai for whom accessibility remains a legal guarantee only on paper as they continue to face exclusion in everyday navigation.

   

7. Mitti Café vs. Museum Café: Lessons in Sustained Inclusion: Chennai’s Museum Café, a space for meaningful employment of PwDs, was recently closed, highlighting how inclusive initiatives can fail when administrative priorities outweigh social welfare. By contrast, Mitti Café at Rashtrapati Bhavan continues to thrive, providing PwDs with meaningful jobs, independence, and recognition, earning praise from President Droupadi Murmu and Former Chief Justice Chandrachud. This underscores that sustained funding, infrastructure, and visibility are essential for dignified and empowering disability inclusion.

These are some additional updates, we thought you might like:

1. India introduces a series of initiatives for PwDs, ahead of the International Day of the Persons with Disabilities

2. The President of India conferred the 2025 National Awards for the Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, with Nipun Malhotra receiving the award for Individual Excellence

3. Delhi Govt Launches Digital Platform for Caregiver Benefits

4. Gujarat lowers bar for disability aid from 80% benchmark disability to 60% benchmark disability expanding inclusion.

5. Madurai Gets New Disability Rehabilitation Centre (CRC) and has signed on NBCC for implementation

6. India’s Blind Women’s Cricket Team Clinches Historic T20 WC Win Title

7. Godrej Showcases Assistive Tech for PwD Employees to facilitate workforce participation

8. On International Day of Persons with Disabilities, JKHA Protests Delay in Enforcement of Disability Rights Act

9. Activists Urge Andhra Pradesh Government to Extend Pension to Orphaned Children with Disabilities

Subscribe to this newsletter for fortnightly updates on the disability ecosystem.

Subscribe now

If you are reading this in Gmail, to translate the newsletter, click the three dots in the top right corner of the email, select Translate Message, and choose your preferred language.

For feedback and thoughts, write to us at office@thequantumhub.com.

Nipman Foundation is committed to ensuring that individuals with disabilities have access to mobility devices, job opportunities, and an ecosystem that promotes dignity and happiness. Specifically, it focuses on Accessibility, Attitudes, and Affordability to make a lasting impact.

The Quantum Hub (TQH) is a public policy research and advocacy organization that engages with businesses, policymakers, philanthropies and think tanks to inform and shape policy.