**Rahul Bajaj
Between 17th and 25th September, 2025, the Delhi government ran the Sugamya Delhi Abhiyan, a campaign designed to audit and improve accessibility in public buildings across the city.
The initiative seeks to bring community and corporate stakeholders on a common platform government. It seeks to deploy a combination of policy reforms and government interventions, lived realities and experiences, and CSR-driven innovation and economic inclusion. The initiative sets as its mission making Delhi India’s first truly inclusive purple city by 2028 – purple being the colour of disability inclusion – with 65% buildings being accessible.
The goals of the initiative are laudable and unexceptionable but, as with many other such initiatives, the proof of the pudding will lie in the eating.
Accessibility as a Legal and Policy Imperative
The issue of accessibility in the built environment has received a concerted push from multiple quarters in recent times. Recently, the Court of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) issued a sweeping Record of Proceedings (ROP) in a suo motu case consolidating over 36 complaints regarding inaccessible built environment. The CCPD noted that despite the RPwD Act, 2016 and its Rules mandating ramps, tactile paths, handrails, and accessible toilets, many government buildings remain non-compliant even today. Importantly, the Court announced that accessibility audits of government-owned and government-used buildings would be carried out post-August 2025, with the involvement of experts and representatives from the disability community. Where violations are found, fines under Section 89 of the RPwD Act will be imposed, not only on departments like CPWD and NBCC but on erring establishments. The CCPD’s ROP also highlighted systemic solutions: requiring accessibility audit reports at the stage of building permits and completion certificates, training municipal engineers and architects in accessibility norms and inspecting hospitals and exam centres for compliance. This reflects an emerging view that accessibility is not a matter of charity or afterthought—it is a non-negotiable legal requirement.
This language of “non-negotiability” was first set out by the Supreme Court in its landmark judgment in November 2024, in the case of Rajive Raturi v. Union of India. In Raturi, the Supreme Court directed the Union of India to formulate a set of non-negotiable accessibility norms in each sector, including the built environment. A draft set of norms has been released in the public domain and the final version is awaited.
Implementation Roadmaps and Policy Thinking
Legal mandates, however, must be backed by practical roadmaps for their effective implementation. The Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy has recently come out with an implementation roadmap called: “Building Better Cities: Making Public Buildings More Accessible at the State and Municipal Level.” The roadmap offers a set of phased and prioritized actions for governments, regulators, and institutions to achieve accessibility in a time-bound manner. A couple of illustrations of why such a roadmap is important may be instructive. While the Supreme Court in Raturi requires that building permits be withheld if compliance with non-negotiable accessibility norms is not ensured, Delhi’s Unified Building Bye-Laws, 2016, do not have any implementation friendly mechanism to operationalize this mandate or a way to track compliance. To address this lacuna, the roadmap suggests embedding accessibility checks into existing online portals to submit building permits, such as MCD-EODB (Ease of Doing Business) portal; NDMC-BPAMS (Building Plan Approval Management System) and DDA-OBPS (Online Building Permit System). Second, Section 45(2) of the RPwD Act requires that the accessibility of some categories of public buildings be prioritized, such as schools and hospitals but there is no framework at present to retrofit existing public buildings or to operationalize this mandate. For this, the roadmap suggests making an action plan that outlines details such as the specific buildings being covered, current level of accessibility, proposed timeline for retrofitting and remarks on key activities to be undertaken along with potential challenges and solutions.
This combination of legal rulings, regulatory directions and policy proposals creates an enabling environment for change. Yet, the history of disability rights in India cautions us that good paper often struggles to become good practice without sustained follow-ups and the adoption of an institutional approach.
From Paper to Pavement: Ensuring Tangible Change
Delhi’s citizens with disabilities do not live in policy documents—they live in a city of buses, metro stations, schools, banks, and hospitals. The true test of the Sugamya Delhi Abhiyan and other initiatives will be whether a wheelchair user can enter a government building without assistance, whether a visually impaired candidate can independently navigate an exam centre and whether a hearing-impaired person can access public services with sign language support. What is required is a holistic, bottoms-up approach. One that ensures that training on building accessibility is mandatorily imparted as part of the academic curriculum, that municipal officials are regularly trained on accessibility norms and that accessibility gets integrated into institutional processes and policies. Now is an opportune moment for the capital city to lead by example for its disabled citizenry.
**Rahul Bajaj is a Senior Associate Fellow, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, New Delhi, India. He was a Rhodes Scholar (India and Linacre 2018) at the University of Oxford. Rahul is also a practicing lawyer in the courts of Delhi and the Co-Founder of an NGO called Mission Accessibility which also works on advancing the rights of the disabled.
**Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily align with the views of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.
About the Authors
Rahul Bajaj is Senior Associate Fellow [Disability Rights] at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. In this role, Rahul works with Vidhi's Disability Inclusion and Access team to provide high quality thought leadership on legal policy issues concerning persons with disabilities, assists the team with various origination and engaged projects, spearheads the team's strategic litigation efforts and assists in building mutually beneficial partnerships. Rahul is also a practicing lawyer in the courts of Delhi and the Co-Founder of an NGO called Mission Accessibility which also works on advancing the rights of the disabled. Rahul's prior experiences including working in the Disputes Practice in Trilegal, Delhi, pursuing two masters in law degrees from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and clerking for the current Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud.