Technology, Disability and the Right to Access: Rethinking the RPwD Framework in India

Picture a blind pensioner standing at a bank's e-KYC kiosk, unable to blink on command for a camera she cannot see, watching her monthly pension recede further out of reach. Picture an acid-attack survivor whose disfigured face will not satisfy a ‘liveness’ algorithm calibrated for a face that no longer exists for her. These are not hypothetical grievances. They are documented facts that reached the Supreme Court of India, and they expose something uncomfortable: a decade after India promised its disabled citizens a rights-based regime, the technology built to serve them is, in crucial ways, still built against them.^[1]

India's Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 (‘RPwD Act’) was meant to retire the medical model of disability, which locates the problem in the body, for a social model that locates it in an environment never designed for that body. Nine years on, the promise is only half kept. The deeper argument here is that India has progressively constitutionalised accessibility as a formal right, while its regulatory framework still treats access as a matter of physical entry rather than technological design, independent use and accountability for failure. Until access, independence and accountability are read together, the RPwD framework will keep producing rights that persons with disabilities must litigate, one judgment at a time, to make real.

From ‘May’ to ‘Must’: Making Accessibility Enforceable

For years, the RPwD Act's accessibility mandate was quietly gutted by its own subordinate legislation. Rule 15 of the RPwD Rules 2017 spoke in the soft voice of recommendation, departments ‘may’ adopt accessibility standards, even as the parent Act spoke in the hard voice of obligation.^[2] A right that depends on a bureaucrat's discretion is not a right; it is a favour, revocable at will. That is the sleight of hand the Supreme Court caught in Rajive Raturi v Union of India, while reviewing a decade of half-hearted compliance with the eleven action points first laid down in Union of India v National Federation of the Blind, and finding the same excuses recurring: no budget, no timeline, no urgency.^[3]

The Court held that a rule drafted in discretionary language could not lawfully carry out a statute that intended mandatory compliance, struck down Rule 15 as ultra vires to that extent, and gave the Union Government three months to produce an accessibility floor with teeth.^[4] The reasoning matters more than the deadline: it tied accessibility to Article 21 dignity, holding that a person with disability cannot live a meaningful life in an environment, physical or digital, engineered around a body that is not theirs.^[5] Sections 40, 44, 45 and 46 of the Act, covering the built environment, transport and information technology, were restored to what Parliament always meant: enforceable duties, not polite suggestions.^[6]

When the Algorithm Becomes the Gatekeeper

If Rajive Raturi fought the battle of ramps and rules, the harder war is being waged in biometric governance. India's welfare state now runs substantially through Aadhaar authentication: iris scans, fingerprints, and increasingly, facial ‘liveness’ checks that ask a user to blink, or align their face just so, before a screen.^[7] For a visually impaired citizen, or a person with facial disfigurement, this is exclusion from the ration shop, the bank account, the pension disbursal that the system exists to deliver. A security feature meant to protect identity becomes, for a subset of citizens, the mechanism that erases it.

This is exactly what brought Pragya Prasun v Union of India to the Supreme Court: a joint petition by acid-attack survivors and a fully visually impaired petitioner, against a digital KYC regime that recognised only one way of proving you are alive.^[8] Their case was not that security screening was illegitimate, but that a single, visually mediated liveness test had been allowed to operate as the only gate, with no accessible door built alongside it.^[9] The Court agreed: digital exclusion of this kind breaches equality under Article 14 and dignified life under Article 21, and the RPwD Act operates as a super-statute against which even the Reserve Bank of India, SEBI and telecom regulators must be measured.^[10] Twenty directions followed, including non-visual liveness methods, retained paper-based options, mandatory audits and dedicated grievance cells.^[11]

The lesson should unsettle anyone who thinks accessibility regulation stops at the ramp and the Braille sign. Facial recognition is an assistive-technology question in disguise: when it fails to recognise a disfigured or sightless face, a tool built for security quietly becomes a tool of discrimination.

Accommodation, Technology and the Problem of Dependence

Not every failure of accessibility regulation is about machines shutting people out. Some are about the law assuming human mediation is the only available accommodation. Consider the scribe. In Vikash Kumar v Union Public Service Commission, a civil services aspirant with dysgraphia, or writer's cramp, was denied a scribe because his condition did not meet the statutory threshold of ‘benchmark disability’, a category built for employment reservation, not for deciding who gets to write an exam with dignity.^[12][13] The Supreme Court called this out: a threshold devised for one purpose had been repurposed to gatekeep an entirely different right. Reasonable accommodation, it held, must answer the individual's actual barrier, not an unrelated percentage on a certificate.^[14]

It is tempting to conclude that a scribe is simply an inferior accommodation, necessary only until better technology arrives. That framing overreaches. The stronger argument is that reasonable accommodation must be technology-neutral and autonomy-enhancing: the law should not assume human mediation is the only route to inclusion, but neither should it dismiss a scribe as illegitimate merely because a screen reader exists in principle.^[15] The real failure is that examination infrastructure across India still treats the scribe as the default, and technology-enabled alternatives as an afterthought candidates must separately fight for.

Accessibility Beyond the Ramp

Accessibility does not end when a person crosses a building's threshold. It follows them into the classroom, the library and the information environment. Walk into most Indian government buildings and you will find a ramp at the entrance and precisely nothing thought through beyond it: no accessible washroom, no tactile signage, no lift wide enough for a wheelchair, despite the Harmonised Guidelines that have existed for years.^[16] Private commercial buildings have, until recently, treated accessibility as charity rather than compliance, which is exactly why Rajive Raturi had to intervene after a decade of voluntary compliance that never arrived.^[17]

The same logic carries into the library. Section 52(1)(zb) of the Copyright Act 1957, inserted to give effect to the Marrakesh Treaty, already permits libraries and schools to convert any book into Braille, audio or large print for a print-disabled student, with no licence required.^[18] Yet institutions frequently refuse to record a single textbook, citing a copyright fear that Parliament closed off more than a decade ago.^[19] This is a failure of nerve, not a gap in the law, and a student loses a semester because an administrator would rather say no than read a statute already in hand.

When Assistive Technology Itself Fails

This is the question almost no one in India's disability-rights discourse is asking yet, and it should worry us. Every discussion so far has assumed that the problem is access: can a disabled person reach the building, the interface, the examination hall. There is a second, harder question hiding behind the first. What happens when the technology built to assist a disabled person is itself unreliable, and that unreliability produces a legal or material harm?

A screen reader misreads a legal notice. Predictive text substitutes a word that changes the meaning of a medical consent form. An augmentative and alternative communication device generates output that misrepresents what its user meant to say. In each case the technology has not merely failed to help; it has spoken on someone's behalf, and spoken wrongly. The RPwD Act's enforcement machinery has almost nothing to say about this: its penal provision caps liability at a fine extending to ten thousand rupees on a first contravention, a sanction built for an institution that forgot to install a ramp, not for a device whose error could cost someone a job or a legal right.^[20]

The argument worth pressing is that accessibility, accuracy and accountability form a single chain, not three separate concerns. An assistive technology cannot be genuinely rights-compliant merely because a disabled person can use it; it must also be reliable enough not to distort that person's communication, choices or legal entitlements. The logic both Rajive Raturi and Pragya Prasun establish points exactly here: if the State is accountable for whether an interface is accessible, it must be equally accountable for whether the words that interface puts in a disabled person's mouth are true. Nobody currently enforces that duty.

The Missing Pillar: Affordability

Accessibility and accountability are pillars a court can order into existence. Affordability is harder, because it is a question of who pays, and courts are reluctant to write budgets. Section 46 of the RPwD Act itself lets private establishments off the hook ‘subject to the provision of adequate finances’, a caveat that risks becoming a permanent alibi rather than a genuine limit.^[21] An accessible solution that only the affluent disabled citizen can afford is not a right at all; it is a privilege wearing the vocabulary of rights, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which the RPwD Act exists to give domestic effect to, treats accessibility and affordability as inseparable.^[22] The Supreme Court's insistence in Pragya Prasun on keeping paper-based alternatives alive alongside digital ones is as much an affordability safeguard as an accessibility one: it stops the ‘accessible’ solution from becoming the only solution, and therefore a new wall for anyone without a smartphone or stable connection.^[23]

From Rights on Paper to Technology in Practice

In barely four years, India's regulation of disability and technology has moved from polite recommendations to a regime in which the Supreme Court treats accessibility as a precondition of constitutional citizenship. Rajive Raturi secured the physical floor; Pragya Prasun pushed that floor into the biometric register that now decides whether a citizen can access their own money; Vikash Kumar reminded the system that accommodation must widen toward independence, not settle for permanent mediation.

But a judgment is not a ramp, and a direction is not a redesigned KYC form. What remains is the unglamorous work of enforcement: buildings actually inspected, KYC platforms actually rebuilt, libraries that finally trust a copyright exemption Parliament handed them a decade ago, and a legal framework willing to ask not only whether a disabled person can access a technology, but whether that technology can be trusted to represent them accurately once they do. Until that work is done, the blind pensioner still stands at the kiosk, and the acid-attack survivor still waits for a camera to recognise a face it was never built to see. A rights-based framework for technology and disability is only as real as the accountability that makes access, independence and accuracy routine, rather than something a citizen must litigate their way into.

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This blog has been authored by Usman Saifi , LLM Candidate at National Law School of India University, Banglore

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REFERENCES

^[1] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, s 2(a)-(c), read with the Schedule.

^[2] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules 2017, r 15.

^[3] Rajive Raturi v Union of India 2024 INSC 858 (SC), paras 27-34.

^[4] Rajive Raturi (n 2) para 55, holding r 15(1) 'ultra vires the scheme and legislative intent of the RPWD Act'.

^[5] Constitution of India 1950, art 21; Rajive Raturi (n 2) paras 20-26.

^[6] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, ss 40, 44, 45 and 46.

^[7] Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act 2016, s 2(g)-(k) read with Unique Identification Authority of India, Aadhaar Authentication API specifications (2021).

^[8] Pragya Prasun v Union of India 2025 INSC 599 (SC)

^[9] ibid paras 12-18.

^[10] ibid paras 41-471

^[11] ibid.

^[12] Vikash Kumar v Union Public Service Commission (2021) 5 SCC 370 (SC) [44].

^[13] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, s 2(r) (definition of 'person with benchmark disability').

^[14] Vikash Kumar (n 12) [42]-[45].

^[15] Jeeja Ghosh v Union of India (2016) 7 SCC 761 (SC) [37], on the distinction between formal and substantive equality for persons with disabilities.

^[16] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, ss 16 and 42; Harmonised Guidelines and Space Standards for Barrier Free Built Environment for Persons with Disabilities and Elderly Persons (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, 2021).

^[17] Rajive Raturi (n 2) paras 8-14, recording the limited compliance of States and Union Territories with the eleven action points identified in Union of India v National Federation of the Blind (2013) 10 SCC 772.

^[18] Copyright Act 1957, s 52(1)(zb), inserted by the Copyright (Amendment) Act 2012.

^[19] Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled (adopted 27 June 2013, entered into force 30 September 2016) art 4.

^[20] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, s 89, prescribing a maximum fine of ten thousand rupees for a first contravention.

^[21] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, s 46, requiring compliance within a stipulated period 'subject to the provision of adequate finances'.

^[22] Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (adopted 13 December 2006, entered into force 3 May 2008) 2515 UNTS 3, arts 9 and 21.

^[23] Pragya Prasun (n 8) Direction (iii), on retention of assisted or paper-based alternatives.