The ruling was the easy part: India’s accessibility order meets enforcement

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A strong judgment is a beginning, not an ending. That is the lesson playing out in India’s Supreme Court, where a landmark 2024 ruling declared accessibility a fundamental right, and where the years since have been spent on the harder question: making it real on the ground. The story now is not the ruling. It is enforcement.

For readers anywhere who care about disability rights, the Indian case is worth watching, because it puts a spotlight on the gap every accessibility law has to cross. Passing the law is one thing. Building the ramp, filling the oversight job, and imposing a consequence when nothing happens is another.

What the court decided in 2024

On 8 November 2024, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, led by then Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and including Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice Manoj Misra, ruled in Rajive Raturi v. Union of India that access to public spaces is a constitutional matter, not a courtesy. “Accessibility is not merely a convenience, but a fundamental requirement for enabling individuals, particularly those with disabilities, to exercise their rights fully and equally,” the bench said.

The court struck down a rule that had treated accessibility standards as recommendations rather than requirements. It found that Rule 15 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017, was written in discretionary language that contradicted the mandatory obligations in the underlying Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016. The judgment made clear that complying with accessibility norms is not optional but mandatory, and that failure would carry consequences. It directed the central government to write mandatory standards for the physical environment, transport, information, and communication.

Where it stalled

Then came the follow-through. Fifteen months after the ruling, the petitioners were back in court describing roadblocks. At a compliance hearing on 11 February 2026, they told the bench that enforcement mechanisms were weak and that responsibility for compliance was being pushed onto a single department, the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, while other ministries stepped back. The court granted the government four more months to file its report.

The petitioners pointed to a specific hole. The rules leaned on withholding a building’s completion certificate, and imposing fines, as the way to force compliance. That works for a new building, which needs the certificate to open. It does nothing for a sector that needs no prior government clearance to operate, such as a website. There, the threat of withholding a certificate reaches nobody, and the rules had little to put in its place. The petitioners proposed one: make the relevant ministry responsible for obtaining an undertaking from the business that its product or service complies, as a precondition of market access.

The July 2026 hearing

The pattern held into the summer. On 29 July 2026, a bench of Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan took up a fresh status report and issued a set of pointed directions. Pardiwala had sat on the 2024 judgment too, so the bench monitoring compliance is partly the bench that wrote the ruling.

The court told the central government and ten states and union territories to fill vacant oversight posts within four weeks. It named Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Nagaland, Puducherry, Sikkim, and Tamil Nadu, and said these were statutory positions under Section 79 of the Act that should be filled by independent commissioners, not officers holding the job as an extra duty. “Laxity, if any, shall be viewed very strictly,” Justice Pardiwala said. The court also took note of the submission that the national post of Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities has had no regular appointee since 2019, with a departmental secretary carrying it as an additional charge, and directed the government to appoint the Chief Commissioner and two Additional Commissioners, as Section 74 requires, within the same four weeks.

On the substance, the government said the final notification of accessibility standards for the built environment was ready and awaiting approval, that draft rules on information and communication technology had been published, and that a draft report on assistive technologies had been prepared. The court urged the government to close a gap in the law’s penalty provisions by building an effective mechanism to actually recover fines, and ordered that the rule-making exercise be completed, and the proposed non-negotiable accessibility standards notified, within six months. It also directed that the status report and draft rules be circulated to stakeholders for response. The next monitoring date is 20 January 2027.

Read together, the directions tell you where the pressure points are: empty oversight chairs, standards stuck one step short of the finish line, and penalties on the books that are hard to collect. None of that is about the text of the law, which the 2024 judgment already read as imposing mandatory obligations. It is about the distance between the law and the doorway.

The same hard part, closer to home

That distance is not unique to India. Canada has its own framework in the Accessible Canada Act, which received royal assent in June 2019 and sets the goal of a barrier-free Canada by 1 January 2040. Enforcement is split three ways: the Accessibility Commissioner covers most organizations and can issue a notice of violation carrying a penalty of up to $250,000 per violation, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission handles broadcasting and telecommunications and the Canadian Transportation Agency handles the federal transportation network, each within its own priority areas. Different country, different mechanism, but the same order of difficulty: a target date and an enforcement office are the start of the work, not proof it is done.

What the Indian hearings make visible is the machinery that has to run for years after the headline. Someone has to hold the oversight job. Standards have to be finalized, not merely drafted. And a fine has to be collectible, or it is not a deterrent. For anyone tracking how accessibility promises turn into accessible places, that machinery, unglamorous as it is, is the whole story.

Frequently asked questions

What did India’s Supreme Court decide in Rajive Raturi v. Union of India?

On 8 November 2024, a three-judge bench ruled that access to public spaces is a constitutional matter, not a courtesy. It struck down Rule 15 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017, which it found was written in discretionary language that contradicted the mandatory obligations in the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016. The bench directed the central government to write mandatory standards for the physical environment, transport, information, and communication.

What did the Supreme Court direct at the 29 July 2026 hearing?

A bench of Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Justice K.V. Viswanathan told the central government and ten states and union territories to fill vacant oversight posts within four weeks. It also directed the government to appoint the Chief Commissioner and two Additional Commissioners within the same period, and ordered the rule-making exercise completed and the proposed accessibility standards notified within six months. The next monitoring date is 20 January 2027.

Why did the petitioners say enforcement was weak?

At a compliance hearing on 11 February 2026, the petitioners told the bench that enforcement mechanisms were weak and that responsibility for compliance was being pushed onto a single department. They also pointed out that withholding a completion certificate works for a new building but reaches nobody in a sector that needs no prior government clearance to operate, such as a website.

How is accessibility enforced under Canada’s Accessible Canada Act?

The Act received royal assent in June 2019 and sets the goal of a barrier-free Canada by 1 January 2040. Enforcement is split three ways: the Accessibility Commissioner covers most organizations and can issue a notice of violation carrying a penalty of up to $250,000 per violation, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission handles broadcasting and telecommunications, and the Canadian Transportation Agency handles the federal transportation network.

Have the commissioner posts been filled since the court’s deadline?

The four weeks the Court allowed ran out at the end of August. We looked on 19 September 2026 and again on 5 October 2026 and found no reporting that the Chief Commissioner, the two Additional Commissioners or the ten State Commissioners have been appointed, and no further order. That is an absence of reporting rather than proof the posts are still empty, and the next listed date for the Court to take stock is 20 January 2027.

Sources

The four weeks the Court allowed ran out at the end of August. We looked on 19 September 2026 and again on 5 October 2026 and found no reporting that the Chief Commissioner, the two Additional Commissioners or the ten State Commissioners have been appointed, and no further order. That is an absence of reporting rather than proof the posts are still empty, and the next listed date for the Court to take stock is 20 January 2027.

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