Guest Post by VIRAJ KAFLE 

The landscape of disability rights in India underwent a seismic shift on December 27, 2015, not through a legislative amendment or a landmark judicial decree, but via a radio broadcast. During his Mann Ki Baat program, Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggested that the term viklang be replaced with divyang. While ostensibly a move to alter societal mindsets and reduce stigma, this nomenclature shift signaled a profound reorientation of the state’s relationship with its disabled citizenry. This declaration of “divinity” arrived a full year before the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act of 2016 was actually passed, effectively setting a paternalistic tone for the rights-based framework that followed.

By invoking “divinity” to describe physical or sensory impairments, the discourse moved disability from a hard-won, rights-based framework into a deified, body-focused model that prioritizes symbolic elevation over material accessibility. As disability activist Nidhi Goyal has argued, this is merely a new way to tell the disabled they are “not normal”—moving them from “abnormal” to “supernormal,” but never simply equal. It is generally accepted that to be disabled is to be “disabled by society,” yet the divyang narrative replaces this political recognition with an abject surrender to divinity that reflects a forced consent of the disabled to their own marginalization.

This shift from a social model to a charity-based deification model is mirrored in the history and text of the RPWD Act itself. While the 2016 Act is often celebrated as progressive, its roots lie in a 2014 Bill introduced by the previous UPA government that was met with large-scale protests. Hundreds of visually impaired persons staged demonstrations near the then-Prime Minister’s residence, protesting the government’s attempt to push the legislation through an ordinance route —a move seen as bypassing democratic scrutiny for a “flawed” document. Activist Amba Salelkar critiqued the early drafts for replacing the rigorous “reasonable accommodation” standards with vague terms like “appropriate environment,” leaving accessibility at the discretion of the employer rather than a mandatory right.

The final 2016 Act carries the scars of this hedging. Despite its binding appearance, the Act is replete with “non-penal” spaces where the state’s obligations are conditioned by its own convenience. Section 24(1), for instance, mandates that the government shall formulate schemes for an adequate standard of living only “within the limit of its economic capacity and development.” Similarly, Section 3(3) provides a massive loophole for discrimination, stating that no person with disability shall be discriminated against “unless it is shown that the impugned act or omission is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.” These phrases transform what should be non-negotiable rights into mere aspirational goals, allowing the state to deify the body while systematically denying it redress.

The tangible manifestations of this shift are most visible in the built and digital environments. Prior to the 2016 demonetization, the Mahatma Gandhi series of banknotes featured distinct tactile markers and size variations that allowed the blind to identify currency by touch. The new series introduced post-2016 systematically eroded these identifying markers. As any quantitative analysis would show, the 4mm difference between the new INR 100, 200, and 500 notes falls well below the psychophysical threshold required for reliable tactile identification. To address the resulting outcry, the Reserve Bank of India launched the Mobile Aided Note Identifier (MANI) app. This technological “crutch” shifts the burden of accessibility entirely onto the individual, who must now possess an expensive smartphone to perform a basic transaction—a move that activists like Vaishnavi Jayakumar argue ignores the representations and lived needs of the community. In our cities, the built environment reflects a similar “criminal negligence.” In Delhi, tactile pavements—designed as lifelines for navigation—are frequently obstructed by electric poles, police booths, and kiosks. When challenged in court, civic agencies often engage in a blamegame between the Public Works Department and municipal corporations, ensuring that accessibility remains a decorative afterthought. This lack of accountability extends to the digital realm, where the 2024 annual report of the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities shows that the number of accessible central government websites has remained stagnant at just 95 since 2020. While the Court of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities recently fined 155 establishments for digital inaccessibility, the INR 10,000 penalty is effectively a negligible “transaction fee” for multi-million-dollar entities to continue their noncompliance.

The gatekeeping of higher education and the democratic franchise further illustrates this erosion of rights. Rapid curricular changes, such as the shift to semester systems in the 2010s, the introduction and rollback of the Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) in 2013, the rollout of the Choice-Based Credit System (CBCS) in 2015, and the reintroduction of FYUP under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, have often outpaced accommodations for disabled students, exacerbating barriers due to inflexible pacing, assessment demands, and inadequate support structures—as highlighted in the 2013 petition by the disability rights organization Sambhavana, which challenged FYUP’s implementation in the Delhi High Court and Supreme Court on grounds of inaccessibility and discrimination against students with disabilities. This was compounded by the abolition of the Five-Year Plan system in 2017, following the replacement of the Planning Commission with NITI Aayog in 2015, which diluted structured funding and implementation of support mechanisms such as Enabling Units envisaged under the UGC’s Higher Education for Persons with Special Needs (HEPSN) scheme during earlier plans like the Eleventh (2007-2012) and Twelfth (2012-2017) Five-Year Plans. Finally, the Supreme Court’s recent stay on the UGC’s 2026 Promotion of Equity Regulations—which sought to replace weak 2012 guidelines with enforceable anti-discrimination committees—has reverted universities to a system lacking mandatory penalties for excluding disabled students, further entrenching these barriers.

In the electoral arena, the Election Commission’s mantra of “No Voter Left Behind” remains symbolic for many. Blind voters are still unable to verify their votes through the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT), which is purely visual. Reports from the 2024 elections highlighted instances where Braille ballot sheets were absent or in the wrong order, forcing many in need to wait for arrangements to be made or to sacrifice the secrecy of their ballot by using a companion. As scholar Nilika Mehrotra has observed, the disability rights movement in India has often been driven more by international pressure than by a genuine internal shift in state policy. However, more than these international pressures, the change in nomenclature to “divyang” and the accompanying policy focus appear to be informed by pre-modern Indian views on disability, which often frame impairments through religious lenses of divinity, karma, and divine ordination— reinforcing a charity-based approach over rights-based equality.

Reclaiming a radical, rights-based framework requires moving beyond the sugar-coated “divyang” terminology and the deified ritual of inclusion. It demands the removal of the “economic capacity” qualifiers that hedge the state’s legal obligations and the implementation of significant deterrents for institutional neglect. Until the state treats accessibility as a non-negotiable legal mandate rather than a divine favor, the promise of the 2016 Act will remain what it is today: a deified body with diminished rights.

Viraj Kafle teaches at Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi