The air in the ADAPT Auditorium in Bandra was thick with a quality rare for an address of this nature and from a man of the speaker’s stature: raw, unfiltered emotion. On the podium was Dr. D Y Chandrachud, the former Chief Justice of India, there not just as a distinguished jurist outlining constitutional mandates, but a father speaking from the heart about the countless small negotiations families like his have to live with in India.
He spoke of his two beloved daughters, Priyanka and Mahi, and their battle with nemaline myopathy. He described his and wife Kalpana’s intimate struggles: the search for a school whose science labs they could access, the hunt for a home in Delhi that could accommodate their wheelchairs, the profound realisation that “every public space reflects the same inaccessibility. Our lives had to be built around their needs.”
The audience, a gathering of some of India’s foremost doctors, disability rights pioneers, and policymakers, listened in rapt silence. Among them was Ashish Shelar, Cabinet Minister for Culture and Information Technology for Maharashtra. What happened next was proof of the power of a personal story to catalyse political action. Moved beyond protocol, Shelar, upon taking the podium, set aside his prepared remarks.
“I commit,” he announced, his voice resonating with conviction, “that as the IT minister for the government of Maharashtra, I will set up a special committee to move digital literacy in the state in an inclusive way.” He further pledged to “look into inclusive ways to fill the vacancy in the government.” It was a moment rare not just for disability rights, but political immediacy where a policy promise came not from a cabinet memo, but a shared sense of humanity awakened by one man’s emotional story. It was not the ex-CJI who had scored the victory on the podium in the morning of August 24th, it was a desperate father.
Dr. Chandrachud was at the ADAPT (Able Disable All People Together) centre to launch its pioneering initiative, “The Journal of Inclusion and Disability: Research, Neuro Rehabilitation and Empowerment.” The event, chaired by the formidable Dr. Mithu Alur, the founder and guiding light of India’s disability movement as well as ADAPT, featured two of India’s most famous doctors: Dr. Samiran Nundy, the journal's Editor-in-Chief and Dr. Farokh Udwadia, its Joint Editor. But the day went beyond its ceremonial purpose, hopefully becoming a national conversation on the very meaning of inclusion.
And that was all because Dr. Chandrachud masterfully wove into the grand tapestry that is constitutional law, the delicate threads of his personal life. “The edifice of our Constitution rests safely on three pillars: liberty, equality, and fraternity,” he stated. “These are not phrases frozen on constitutional parchment. They are the architecture of a living republic.”
He then gave those pillars a heartbreakingly human form. He recalled the traumatic diagnostic process for his elder daughter, which involved taking a tissue sample without anaesthesia. “She cried as she said, ‘I do not want my sister to go through this. ’” In that moment of her own agony, her instinct was not self-preservation, but the protection of her younger sister. “The purest form of strength,” Chandrachud reflected, “is the ability to care for another.”
This, he argued, is at the heart of the issue. “Dignity is more than an abstract desire; it is a design problem that must be tackled not eventually, but now.”
From this intimate starting point, he built an unassailable legal and moral argument for inclusion and disability rights. He spoke of his time on the bench, where he “saw numerous situations where systemic barriers, whether architectural, procedural, or altitudinal, eroded the dignity of people.” He cited landmark cases that have shaped India’s disability jurisprudence.
He spoke of Om Rathod, a young aspirant with over 80% mobility impairment who aced the NEET exam but was denied a chance to become a doctor by assessment boards using rigid, ableist benchmarks. The court’s intervention shifted the focus from what he lacked to what he could do. Then there is Vikash Kumar, denied a scribe for the civil services exam due to dysgraphia, and the Supreme Court’s ruling that recognised reasonable accommodation as a fundamental right.
He celebrated the overturning of a past ruling that barred blind candidates from the judiciary, affirming that “the capacity to judge does not lie in the eye but in the mind.” And let’s not forget what Antara Mukherjee of Deloitte, sitting next to me, rhetorically asked at this point: “Isn’t lady justice herself blind?” Each case was a brick on the edifice of inclusion, but Chandrachud was the first to point out the cracks on the wall. He highlighted the continued resistance from bodies like the National Medical Commission (NMC), which, despite judicial rebuke, delayed reforming guidelines that reduced a candidate’s worth to arbitrary physical tasks: “can you climb stairs, can you bear weight on your limb”, as if “medicine were measured only in muscle and bone.” To take Antara’s point further, isn’t the 2300-year-old symbol of medicine – the snake, itself disabled because it has no limbs?
Leading by example: The Supreme Court and the digital realm
Crucially, Dr. Chandrachud detailed how these principles were applied to the very institution he once led. He spoke of realising how inaccessible the Supreme Court of India was and the immediate action he took to get an audit done to make the premises and its IT infrastructure, like its website, accessible to everyone. For him, this was a way to ensure that the highest temple of justice must be open and accessible to all, ensuring that no citizen was denied their fundamental right to justice because of a physical or digital barrier.
This mission for accessibility, he explained, extended far beyond the court’s physical walls into the digital realm, a critical frontier for inclusion in the 21st century. He referenced the landmark decision in Pragya Prasun & Ors. v. Union of India and Amar Jain v. Union of India, where the Supreme Court recognised digital accessibility as an integral element of the right to life and personal liberty. The case tackled the exclusion of people with disabilities from essential digital processes like Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols, calling for sweeping reforms across all regulatory and service frameworks.
“Meanwhile,” he noted, “The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity’s) Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW 3.0) now mandate that all government websites conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards.” He hailed this as a critical policy step, adding the crucial caveat that its power lies in faithful implementation and independent monitoring. “When we build websites and apps that work with screen readers, captions, high-contrast modes, and keyboard navigation, we serve not only people with disabilities, but we also enhance usability and reach for all users.” For him, an accessible website wasn’t a checkbox for compliance; it was the digital ramp to true citizenship.
This, he argued, is why gatherings like this and publications like ADAPT’s new journal are so vital. They exist in the crucial space where activism meets academia, and advocacy meets evidence. “Inclusion is never an act of charity,” he declared, echoing disability rights advocate Haben Girma, “it is a design choice that unlocks human potential.”
He laid out a lot of the emotional core of his argument near the end of his speech. For him, the barriers aren’t abstract. “Every threshold too high, every stair without a ramp, every document without an accessible format; these are not abstractions. They are the barriers that determine whether a child may attend school, a young woman can take her position in the profession, or a citizen can assume her rightful role in society.”
He shared a recent, powerful anecdote. Just two weeks prior, as his family moved into a new home tailored for his daughters’ needs with wheelchair-accessible entries and a custom ICU corner, he stood in an empty hallway watching a contractor adjust a final rail. “I remember thinking: this is not privilege; this inclusion is what every family should find and build into the world around them. This is the minimum a society must guarantee its people.”
His voice tinged with frustration and tacitly addressing the controversy of him being late to move out of the official residence of the CJI at 5, Krishna Menon Marg, New Delhi beyond permissible time after retirement, he added, “If even I, as a parent, with every possible resource at hand, must wait months for a home that can sustain my daughter’s needs, how much more urgent is the call upon our institutions and our cities to keep pace?”
Dismantling the economic argument against accessibility, championing the ‘curb-cut effect’ where design for a specific need (like sidewalk ramps) ends up benefiting everyone (parents with strollers, delivery workers, people with luggage). He said: “it's actually more expensive to leave people out than it is to include them. Economic experts have found that the money we lose from not letting people with disabilities work, go to school, or get good healthcare is much, much greater than the small amount it costs to make things accessible for everyone.” Touche, I could hear the collective relief in the auditorium as he said this.
“A simple ramp isn’t just a convenience: it’s the hinge that opens the door to a building for someone in a wheelchair,” he said. “Captioning on a video isn’t just a helpful note; it’s the voice that allows a hearing-impaired person to understand the conversation. And assistive technology isn’t a crutch: it’s the key that unlocks knowledge… When we design with inclusion at the core, we are not adding amenities, we are unlocking freedom in its most practical form.”
This was the crescendo of his argument: that accessibility is not a cost, but an investment in freedom itself. “Liberty without accessibility,” he concluded, “is like a book sealed shut, it exists, but it cannot be read.”
As the speech ended, the silence held for a beat before breaking into sustained, uproarious applause. The atmosphere was charged. It took the lived experience of one of the country’s most respected figures to map the journey from the abstract ideal of constitutional liberty to the tangible reality of a ramp, a screen reader, or an inclusive policy. It shouldn’t be like this, but the disability movement will take its small gains.
And in that charged atmosphere, Shelar made his promise. It was the perfect, immediate embodiment of the speech’s central thesis: that when empathy is ignited, policy can change in an instant. It proved that the responsibility for inclusion does not lie with a few activists or judges, but with all of us: policymakers, citizens, and designers of our shared world.
Dr. Chandrachud’s speech was not for a launch; it was a mirror held up to our nation. It asked a simple, devastating question: Is our society designed for only some of its people, or for all? The answer, reflected in a minister’s promise and a father’s plea, must be a resounding commitment to build a world where dignity is not something to be demanded, but simply lived.
