Beyond Paralympic medals: The fight for accessibility in India

Bengaluru: The Paris Paralympics ended earlier this month with a record number of medals for India. The frenzy of interviews and photo ops has died down, and India’s disabled athletes will soon be back to living life as they know it in the country—an unforgiving obstacle course.
For the average disabled person in India, access to public spaces is limited and inconvenient. Even if policies that consider their interests exist, they are rarely implemented. Take the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act of 2016. Under this act, educational institutions funded by the government are supposed to have campuses accessible to the disabled, and plans for government buildings are meant to be approved only if they are disability-friendly. Has it been put into practice?
“Not a single state government has incorporated the harmonized guidelines into their building by-laws,” says disability rights activist Nipun Malhotra, founder of ‘Wheels for Life,’ a crowdsourcing platform that connects those who need wheelchairs with donors.
Malhotra took the Delhi government to court a few years ago, demanding that disabled people be exempted from the Odd-Even vehicle rule. “It is the duty of policymakers to be mindful of accessibility. Every architect and landscape designer should know the accessibility guidelines; they should be taught about it in their courses. This would mainstream accessibility, and it is urgently needed.”
Para archer Harvinder Singh agrees. The 33-year-old, who won a historic gold medal in Paris, believes that accessibility for all has a long way to go in India. “If you’re a wheelchair user in India, you need an attendant to help you move around in public places. In any building you visit, all you see are stairs—there are no ramps. Road ramps are an issue too; either they don’t exist or they’re in poor shape. SAI Sonipat has a new hostel, and we’re hearing that the bathrooms there aren’t wheelchair accessible. Our public transport, in general, isn’t wheelchair accessible either.”
Chennai-based activist Vaishnavi Jayakumar, a member of the Freedom of Movement Coalition (FMC)—a pan-India group advocating for equity in public transport—has been battling the union government to amend the PM E-bus Sewa scheme. Launched in August 2023, the scheme aims to deploy 10,000 electric buses on a PPP model.
“They are recommending that those in wheelchairs use a hydraulic lift to board their high-floor electric buses. An electric bus should be low-floor by default. One must experience being suspended mid-air, four feet above the ground in a wheelchair, to understand how scary it can be. A woman, even before the lift was deployed, fell backward in her wheelchair and cracked her head. What about those with crutches? Only in India do we see electric buses that aren’t low-floor, and now they’re being exported to Africa as well. It’s a shameful ‘Made in India’ export. We tried to challenge the scheme, but the government would rather risk the lives of disabled people and have them go four feet in the air in unruly traffic than opt for a solution—a universal design that includes everyone.”
FMC moved to court over the scheme, and the union government amended its tender to include low-floor buses. “They included low-floor buses in the tender but did not make it mandatory. Once they stipulated that all these buses must have a lift for passengers in wheelchairs, we found that, under the current law, we could not challenge it without filing a PIL. That is where we are stuck now.”
Taking a train isn’t any less harrowing, and airports in India, Vaishnavi points out, can’t seem to wrap their heads around prosthetics, calipers, or the difference between elderly individuals who use wheelchairs because they can’t walk long distances and those with spinal injuries who can’t stand.
In August, two visually challenged passengers fell onto the tracks at one of Bengaluru’s busiest metro stations and narrowly escaped injury thanks to a swift rescue. It is understood that improper tactile paving at the station was one of the reasons for the incident.
Vaishnavi says that railway stations in Chennai don’t have enough wheelchair ramps to board trains. They are heavy and few and no one wants to drag them around to the different platforms.
“We’ve been pushing to have lighter ramps in every platform,” she says, “If you can’t find someone to help you with your wheelchair out of a train, you might end up being hauled up by people which is both unsafe and scary and if you’re a woman you can end up being groped. A number of our accessibility issues require simple, low-tech solutions. What we have in India is essentially indifference by design.”
Inconvenience, indifference and horrors of navigating public spaces aside, living as a disabled person in India is expensive too. “Especially if you have a locomotive disability,” points out Vaishnavi, “While other people might spend ₹3000 a month on commuting, as a disabled person it can cost you 13,000 a month. This isn’t on recreational activities like going to the beach or the movies, it’s on the absolute basics like travelling to your place of education or work.”
Aman Misra, a deaf journalist and PhD candidate (ABD) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, was in Paris to cover American athletes at the Paralympics. He has lived experiences in both a developing India and the developed West. He found the Paris subway/metro inaccessible for people with disabilities, citing its steep, endless stairs. Tanni Grey-Thompson, an 11-time Paralympic champion from the UK, tweeted about being forced to “crawl off a train” at London’s King’s Cross station after assistance failed to arrive while she was on her way to the opening ceremony of the Paris Paralympics.
“In India, disability is a feel-good social construct, one in which large corporations running cafes and fast-food chains are praised for hiring deaf people. As a prominent disability activist rightly pointed out, India is stuck in a mix of charity, social, and medical models of disability. Like the Grey-Thompsons of the world, Indian athletes with disabilities (AWD) must speak up about inaccessibility, both in sports and in daily life.”
Historically, disability sports have been (and still are) controlled by able-bodied medical practitioners and sports administrators who make decisions for disabled bodies—overseeing their prosthetics, movements, drug tests, and classifications. “It’s a bit like able-bodied men sitting in a room and deciding what a woman can or cannot do with her body.”