New Delhi: When Sravya Sindhuri got her law degree in 2017, she had a simple dream: she wanted to become a judge in Uttarakhand, where she currently resides. Currently, she works at ONGC.
But the 30-year-old visually impaired judicial candidate found herself locked out when she found that a recruitment advertisement for the Uttarakhand Judicial Service Civil Judge (Junior Division) excluded her from the reservation for “persons with benchmark disabilities”.
Sravya challenged the constitutionality of the 16 May advertisement violating Section 34 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which stipulates a 4 percent reservation in government jobs for people with “benchmark disabilities”, a term used for persons with not less than 40 percent of a specified disability.
Currently, recruitment for civil judge (junior division) posts in Uttarakhand is confined to only four types of benchmark disabilities: cured leprosy, acid attack victims, muscular dystrophy and dwarfism. This effectively excludes other benchmark disabilities, like blindness, or even locomotor disabilities, from reservation benefits under this category, Sindhuri argued.
On 9 June, the Supreme Court began hearing a plea filed by Sindhuri, one of the several cases of visually impaired people who continue to face systemic barriers in government jobs despite legal safeguards.
ThePrint examines how people suffering from blindness are still struggling to secure meaningful jobs in government sectors, or even the right opportunities in educational institutions, even though the 2016 Act includes “blindness” and “low vision” under the definition of “visual impairment”, while listing the different types of disabilities.
Apart from Sravya, many other persons with disabilities, like Dr Satendra Singh and advocate Prannv Dhawan, have been at the forefront of the fight for equal opportunity for others like themselves.
Singh, a disability-rights advocate, was lauded by the Supreme Court in Omkar Ramchandra Gond vs. Union of India (2024), where the court ruled that the mere existence of a benchmark disability cannot be a ground to bar an individual from applying to an academic programme.
In that case, the court had said, “Before we part, we will do well to recollect that acclaimed Bharatanatyam dancer Sudha Chandran, Arunima Sinha who conquered Mount Everest, prominent sports personality, H. Boniface Prabhu, entrepreneur Srikanth Bolla and Dr Satendra Singh, the founder of ‘Infinite Ability’, are some of the shining daughters and sons from a long and illustrious list of individuals in India who scaled extraordinary heights braving all adversities.”
Singh is also the co-chair of the International Council for Disability Inclusion in Medical Education and has received an award from the President of India for making the 2021 general elections more accessible.
Dhawan argued for the petitioners, alongside advocate Rushabh Vidyarthi in the landmark Gulshan Kumar vs. Institute of Banking Personnel Selection on 3 February. The top court ruled that all disabled candidates are entitled to scribes, compensatory time and other facilities.
Despite the 2016 Act being in place, these repeated legal battles signal a worrying reality: visually-impaired persons are still forced to approach the courts for enforcement of basic rights.
Although several orders have been passed in favour of PwD rights, problems of implementation still exist, which, advocates say, reveals a lack of empathy among the authorities.
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‘Cut out in a creative way’
One of the main challenges faced by the blind community is the lack of labelling in essential medicines, Singh told ThePrint. “There are no QR codes on any medicine, which means that there is no way the blind can easily identify what’s in it. These days, there is a QR code for everything but not where it’s needed.”
He added that the common perception, even among health professionals, is that the blind only understand Braille.
“Such a perception is incorrect because we are now in an era of technological advancement, where one can, with the right tools, read what a prescription says. Most of the cell phones also have assistive technology enabled,” he said.
Singh also criticised the National Medical Commission (NMC) guidelines, saying they effectively bar people with visual disabilities from becoming doctors.
According to him, people often “acquire” visual impairment much later in life, rather than being born with it. “India is the diabetes capital of the world. One of the common complications that occurs with diabetes, for instance, is blindness. Retinitis pigmentosa—a group of eye problems that affect the retina and lead to a progressive decline in one’s vision—is another condition that leads to blindness later in life,” Singh said.
People who are completely blind or deaf have been cut out of medical courses in a “creative way,” Singh said. He explained that candidates must first be certified to have a “benchmark disability” of 40 percent. “The other requirement is that those PwDs who are using assistive devices like hearing aids should be able to show that after using such devices, their disability came down to less than 40 percent.”
He said a doctor’s main job is to look at available information and arrive at a diagnosis. “Reading what is mentioned in the report based on one’s knowledge and arriving at a diagnosis–that’s the job of a doctor, since the diagnosis depends largely on cognition rather than visual or auditory cues. Unfortunately, we have not yet reached a stage in India because there is no guidance on reasonable accommodation till now.”
Singh also said that when the Supreme Court asked for his suggestions in the Om Rathod case of 2024, he had recommended that the National Medical Commission (NMC) issue guidelines for reasonable accommodation in the medical field. “However, no guidelines have come from them till date.”
Need for a level-playing field
Dhawan, who suffers from low vision, says his disability is often overlooked, posting several challenges in the courtroom.
“My visual impairment and disability are largely invisible, because when people see me wearing spectacles, they think that my vision is fully corrected. However, it isn’t so. For instance, when I am in court, looking at a display board or a judge’s demeanor, or even looking at the opposing side, or documents with small fonts, is challenging,” he told ThePrint.
Dhawan, who works as an associate at the chambers of senior advocate Shadan Farasat, pointed to special requirements such as ambient lighting, big fonts, and a monitor that help him work smoothly.
Dhawan graduated from the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, before working with the policy think tank, Centre for Policy Research, and later serving as a law clerk to Supreme Court judge Justice B.V. Nagarathna.
In the Gulshan Kumar case, where he argued for the petitioner who was suffering from focal hand dystonia (a type of writer’s clamp), Dhawan said, “We had urged the court to issue directions in that case, and it did this by directing training programmes for scribes who would assist PwDs.”
“I have been able to understand the issue of discrimination far better because of my own disability. I know what it means to have a level-playing field, and not having it,” he added.
Dhawan also worked on the landmark case Om Rathod vs The Director General Of Health Services (2024), where a three-judge bench led by then CJI D.Y. Chandrachud, passed detailed directions on making the medical profession and educational sector more inclusive.
The court was acting on a plea by Rathod, who suffered from over 80 percent lower limb myopathy, and was denied admission to a medical course.
The court appointed Dr Satendra Singh to reassess the candidate. In his report, Dr Singh said the candidate could perform tasks such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR.
Taking note of the report, the court said that denying reasonable accommodation violated fundamental rights like Articles 14 (right to equality), 21 (right to life and liberty) and 19 (freedom of speech). Significantly, the court also directed that assessment boards should include doctors and health practitioners with disabilities.
The story so far in Sravya’s case
A bench of Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and P.B. Varale has now agreed to place the matter before the Chief Justice of India, B.R. Gavai, for consideration. It will be tagged with a similar case about the recruitment of visually impaired candidates.
In that case, In Re: Recruitment of Visually-Impaired in Judicial Service, a two-judge bench on 3 March ruled that “visually impaired candidates cannot be said to be ‘not suitable’ for judicial service” and are eligible to participate in selection for posts in judicial service.
“Our first concern is that an entire category of blind persons has been excluded, despite the Supreme Court saying that visually impaired persons cannot be excluded from judicial appointments,” Sindhuri’s lawyer Anchal Bhateja, who recently created history as the first blind woman advocate to argue before the Supreme Court of India, told ThePrint.
“In Uttarakhand, for instance, they have excluded 17 kinds of disabilities that could otherwise get such a benefit, and specified only four kinds of disabilities that could apply.”
Commenting on the principle of reasonable accommodation defined under the 2016 Act, as “necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments” to ensure that the PwDs can enjoy their rights equally, Bhateja said, “Now what happens next is that reasonable accommodation will not be provided to these candidates as they have been excluded from the benchmark disability category.”
Bhateja also drew attention to the statutory entitlements of candidates with disabilities, saying, “How can a person with a disability write an exam without reasonable accommodation like a scribe or compensatory time?”
Recalling the Supreme Court’s February ruling in Gulshan Kumar v. Institute of Banking Personnel Selection, Bhateja said the court held that all candidates with disabilities are entitled to the benefit of reasonable accommodation in competitive examinations, irrespective of the extent of their disability.
Bhateja pointed to the inaccessibility of exam notifications as another barrier. “The Uttarakhand exam notification was not accessible to us. We had to take assistance to go through it. The Uttarakhand Public Service Commission website was not fully accessible either,” she said, adding that the inaccessibility of coaching institutes and exam centres is another barrier.
“The 2016 Act is being diluted by several states, which are still refusing to give people their pensions, citing reasons like we will only give it to those PwDs whose disability exceeds the 50 percent mark, and several posts also left unidentified, since Sections 33 and 34 of the Act requires the appropriate government to notify the posts reserved for PwDs. There needs to be some uniformity in how the law is implemented,” she added.
What is a benchmark disability?
The term “benchmark disability” refers to a person with not less than 40 percent of a specified disability that needs to be certified by a government hospital under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.
In June, the Delhi Directorate of Education issued a circular outlining guidelines for admission of children with special needs for entry-level classes in private schools. It defined benchmark disability as “a person with not less than 40 percent of a specified disability where specified disability has not been defined in measurable terms and includes a person with disability where specified disability has been defined in measurable terms, as certified by the certifying authority”.
After the Uttarakhand Judicial Service Civil Judge (Junior Division) advertisement excluded Sindhuri from the reservation for “persons with benchmark disabilities,” she challenged its constitutionality in court.
Her petition challenged the advertisement as it excluded 17 benchmark disabilities from the recruitment process and limited eligibility to just four categories of benchmark disabilities.
Pointing to the advertisement and the lack of response by the Uttarakhand Public Service Commission to Sindhuri’s request for a scribe in the exam, she said that this indicated a lack of reasonable accommodation, which is a statutory requirement under the 2016 Act.
Underlining that such exclusion “is manifestly unreasonable” and has no connection with the functional requirements of judicial service, Sindhuri argued that the Commission was violating the binding precedent laid down by the SC in its 3 March 2025 ruling, which recognised the entitlement of persons with visual impairments to reservation in judicial appointments.
Apart from preventing her from applying under the benchmark disability category, Sindhuri also challenged the advertisement for excluding her because she was a domicile in Uttarakhand.
She said that such a directive hindered her from securing a level-playing field “at par with her able-bodied counterparts”.“The exclusion and the restriction on eligibility of the remaining subcategories of disabilities is arbitrary, discriminatory, and violative of Articles 14, 19(1)(g), and 21 of the Constitution,” the plea said.
Sindhuri added that this affected her fundamental rights to equality, to practice a profession, and to live with dignity by preventing her participation due to her disability and domicile status.
What the law says
Significantly, the plea filed by Sravya Sindhuri relied on the SC’s 3 March ruling, which held that visually-impaired candidates are eligible to participate in the selection process for judicial service.
A bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan struck down the proviso or condition to Rule 7 of the Madhya Pradesh Judicial Service Examination (Recruitment and Conditions of Service) Rules, 1994, which was brought in after the 2023 amendment.
The proviso said that to be eligible for the exam, a candidate must have either completed three years of practice or secured a minimum 50-70 percent aggregate in first attempt. The cut-off for both the general and Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) categories was 50 percent.
In a nutshell, Rule 7 prescribed the eligibility criteria to appear in the preliminary examination of the Madhya Pradesh Judicial Service examination, which in addition to basic requirements, such as Indian citizenship and an L.L.B. degree, also included a three-year practice mandate and a minimum cutoff.
Apart from this, the bench also struck down an amendment to Rule 6A of the 1994 Rules, saying that it was unconstitutional since it did not include visually-impaired persons who were otherwise educationally qualified for the post.
The above-mentioned rule states that 6 percent posts shall be horizontally reserved, only at the time of initial recruitment of persons suffering from locomotor disability including leprosy cured, dwarfism, muscular dystrophy and acid attack victims, excluding cerebral palsy, as specified under the 2016 Act. However, it excludes visually impaired and low vision candidates from appointment in the judicial service.
In its 122-page ruling, the court noted that a “rights-based approach” necessitates that persons with disabilities do not face any discrimination in pursuit of judicial service opportunities, and that there must be affirmative action on behalf of the state to provide an inclusive framework.
“Any indirect discrimination that results in the exclusion of PwDs, whether through rigid cut-offs or procedural barriers, must be interfered with in order to uphold substantive equality,” the bench said.
“The commitment to ensuring equal opportunity necessitates a structured and inclusive approach, where merit is evaluated with due to the reasonable accommodations required, thereby fostering judicial appointments that truly reflect the principles of fairness and justice.”
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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