The early legal perception around disability in India was, at best patronizing and, at worst, alienating. The Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995 gestured toward inclusion but remained tethered to a limited understanding of disability, one that saw it as a condition to be managed rather than a barrier to be dismantled.
The real turning point followed the aisle in 2006 after UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). With it arrived a new vocabulary, one of autonomy, dignity, and participation. Almost a decade later, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 attempted to translate this vocabulary into law, accommodating the UNCRPD. It expanded recognized disabilities by introducing the idea of reasonable accommodation, covering 21 types of disabilities, reservation benefits and more.
Yet, like all transformative ideas, it needed interpretation. It needed to be lived. And that is where the courts stepped in.
When the Law Began to Listen
The shift becomes palpable in Vikash Kumar v Union Public Service Commission the case that, on its surface, asked a simple question: ‘Can a candidate with writer’s cramp be denied a scribe?’ But beneath that question lay something deeper. What does equality mean when bodies do not conform to uniform expectations? The Court’s answer was quietly radical. It spoke of reasonable accommodation not as an exception, but as an obligation, a denial of which would amount to discrimination. It reminded us that equality is not sameness and sometimes, fairness requires the law to bend and to notice.
It was in that moment that disability jurisprudence in India began to move away from rigid categories and toward lived realities.
The Invisible Barriers of a Digital World
If Vikash Kumar asked the law to bend, Pragya Prasun v Union of India asked it to see entailing that Digital Accessibility is a Fundamental Right under Article 21. Therefore KYC protocols must accommodate those with facial disfigurements or visual impairments
We live in a world that increasingly exists behind screens, where identities are verified, services are accessed, and lives are organized through digital systems. But what happens when these systems cannot be navigated by everyone?
The Court, in recognizing digital inaccessibility as a violation of dignity, did something profound. It acknowledged that exclusion is not always physical. Sometimes, it is coded into interfaces, embedded in design, all hidden in the assumption that all users are the same. In underlining thus, the Court extended the very terrain of rights. Accessibility was no longer limited to ramps and railings but also expanded across algorithms, platforms, and the entire architecture of the digital state.
Where Systems Resist
In Mission Accessibility v Union of India , the problem was procedural. A requirement that visually impaired candidates specify their scribes in advance. It seemed administrative, almost trivial. But for those affected, it became a barrier as real as any wall. The Supreme Court recognized this and diluting the earlier deadline, ruled that the UPSC must allow candidates to change their scribe up to seven days before the exam. SC further ordered the modernization of mechanism by deployment of Screen Reader Software (SRS) for visually impaired candidates and demanded a compliance plan from UPSC.
Similarly, in Kabir Pahariya v National Medical Commission t th the denial of medical admission revealed how deeply entrenched notions of “merit” can exclude. The assumption, often unspoken, is that disability and competence cannot coexist. The SC gave a highly critical viewpoint of National Medical Commission’s (NMC) narrow assessment of disability and fitness criteria and advocated for a more functional approach towards assessment of disability as opposed to the strictly clinical one employed hitherto.
The Court’s intervention towards a more liberal and accommodating approach in these cases are important not just for the relief they grant, but for what they expose: that exclusion often survives in the ordinary forms, guidelines and in the quiet rigidity of systems that were never designed to include.
Work, Worth, and the Right to Belong
The story finds one of its most compelling expressions in the most recent ruling of Sujata Bora v Coal India Ltd. embarked via Article 142 of the Constitution of India. Here, the question was not access to an exam or a platform, but to employment, dignity of work and the simple recognition of capability where a visually impaired woman was wrongfully denied a Management Trainee post at Coal India. The denial came dressed in technicalities, as it so often does. But the Court refused to accept it. By directing the creation of a supernumerary post, it made a larger point to require institutions to stretch and adapt for the needs of protecting the rights of working women with disabilities, facing double marginalization owing to an intersection of both gender and disability discriminations.
Work, after all, is not merely economic. It is existential.
Equality, Reimagined and the Work That Remains
What emerges from these cases is not just a line of precedent, but a philosophy of rethinking of equality. For too long, equality in law meant treating everyone the same. But sameness, as these judgments reveal, can be its own form of injustice. True equality lies in recognizing difference without allowing it to become disadvantage.
This is the promise of reasonable accommodation. It is not a concession but a recognition that the world, as it exists, is not neutral, and that fairness more often than not, requires intervention. And yet, there is a quiet unease beneath this progress. For every right that is affirmed in court, there is a reminder that it had to be fought for in the first place. That access still depends on litigation. The law, in its current form, is ahead of many of the institutions it seeks to govern.
What is needed now is not just compliance, but a willingness to design systems that assume diversity rather than accommodate it as an afterthought. And what this evolving jurisprudence ultimately asks of us is simple, and yet deeply difficult: to rethink what it means to be equal. It is essentially carving an idea of equality that is not identical but real, an idea which is not rigid but that which listens and adapts.
About the Author
Shreya Sharma is an Associate Legal Editor at Kraft Legal and holds an LL.M. in Corporate and Business Laws from Gujarat National Law University, Gandhi Nagar. She writes on law and public policy, often drawing from literature and philosophy to explore its human and social dimensions.
Bibliography
[1] Vikash Kumar v Union Public Service Commission (2021) 5 SCC 370.
[2] Pragya Prasun & Ors v Union of India & Ors SCC Online SC 993
[3] Mission Accessibility v Union of India (2025) INSC 1376
[4] Kabir Paharia v National Medical Commission 2025 SCC Online SC 1025
[5] Sujata Bora v Coal India Limited & Others 2026 INSC 53, 2026 SCO.LR 1(3) (13 January 2026)