Ten years after the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD)Act, 2016, India has reason to acknowledge progress, but not yet to celebrate completion.

The Act marked a decisive shift from welfare to rights. It replaced the 1995 law, expanded recognised disabilities from seven to 21 categories, introduced the language of dignity, equality, non-discrimination, reasonable accommodation, accessibility, inclusive education, social security, and participation, and mandated reservations in education and government employment for persons with benchmark disabilities.

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Its greatest achievement is conceptual. It gave disabled people a stronger legal vocabulary to assert that exclusion is not charity denied, but rights violated. The law helped move disability from the margins of policy to the centre of constitutional imagination. The courts have also strengthened this shift. In Vikash Kumar v. UPSC, the Supreme Court clarified that reasonable accommodation is central to equality and that disability rights cannot be reduced only to benchmark disability thresholds. It emphasised that the RPwD Act imposes positive obligations on the State and, in certain contexts, private actors to enable full participation.

There have been administrative gains too. The Unique Disability ID project has attempted to create a national database and uniform........

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