There are some images that stay with you forever. A senior administrative officer — a man who has rolled through the corridors of a premier institution in a wheelchair for decades — was ordered to “report” for a fresh disability examination. The purpose was to prove, yet again, that he cannot walk. This is not a story from a forgotten era. It unfolded this month, at a time when the world observes both International Day of Persons with Disabilities and Human Rights Day.
The chain of events began when an arbitrary diktat — deserving no description other than a Tughlaqi farmaan — was issued by the Divyang Welfare Department (DWD) under the authority of IAS officer Tukaram Mundhe. The hospital administration sprang into action with remarkable speed, but not to improve accessibility in a hospital where only two of the 17 lifts are functional. Nor was the urgency directed toward implementing the long-overdue provisions of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which Maharashtra delayed until 2024. It was also not an effort to adopt ethical guidelines or provide clinical accommodations for medical students, trainees, and faculty with disabilities. Instead, the administration chose to police its own doctors, faculty members, and staff with disabilities.
Every employee with a disability on the hospital’s payroll — professors, administrators, clinicians — received the same message: report for re-examination and prove your disability again. This order came regardless of whether they held permanent UDID certificates issued by the government of India, regardless of whether the hospital itself had issued their disability documents, and regardless of whether they were the very professionals who certify disability for countless patients each year. None of it mattered.
Never-ending agni pariksha
One faculty member stands out in painful detail. A doctor, affected by childhood polio, who completed MBBS, MD, senior residency, and now serves as a respected faculty member, walks with a visible caliper. Yet she was instructed to report to the neurology OPD for “re-evaluation”. The consultant noted her diagnosis — post-polio residual paralysis since birth, wearing a caliper — and still ordered an invasive electromyography (EMG). The absurdity of this direction is staggering. Any first-year medical student can recognise a disability that is visibly apparent and clinically documented. Even more shocking, before she could undergo this unnecessary test, she had to climb two floors because the hospital could not provide a functional elevator. If irony had weight, it would have crushed the staircase beneath her feet.
Another senior professor with a locomotor disability was ordered to undergo X-rays of the hip, knee, and ankle to once again “prove” his lifelong disability. Years of clinical practice, decades of teaching, and countless research contributions offered him no dignity. And then there was this doctor in the adjoining hospital who uses a wheelchair and has not stood in 15 years. Everyone in the hospital knew him and his history, yet he, too, was directed to appear for a fresh medical examination. How does one “re-test” the ability to walk in someone who has not walked in a decade and a half?
At this point, it is important to pause. These individuals are not frauds or new recruits. They are long-serving faculty members, professors, administrators, and specialists with lifelong disabilities, verified through permanent certificates issued under the law. They have healed thousands, trained hundreds, and succeeded in an education and healthcare system designed to exclude them. Yet they were treated as though they were criminals. Even Sita did not endure as many agni parikshas as disabled professionals in Maharashtra are now being subjected to.
What happened in these Mumbai hospitals is not merely a violation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 or Rule 8(2) of the Maharashtra State Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2024. It is a violation of something deeper and far more sacred: the medical profession’s own ethical code. The very consultants who lecture students on non-maleficence, autonomy, beneficence, and human dignity forgot those principles the moment their disabled colleagues became “subjects” in a bureaucratic witch hunt. Not one paused to ask why unnecessary tests were being ordered on healthy colleagues, why people were being subjected to humiliation and pain, or what exactly the administration hoped to prove through these degrading practices.
Also read: 80% Indians with disabilities have no health insurance, says study
A turning point
If the Maharashtra government is genuinely concerned about disability certificate fraud, the correct course of action is simple: investigate the doctors and medical boards who issue false certificates. How many doctors were ever held accountable in the widely publicised Puja Khedkar disability certificate scandal? Instead of addressing the root of the problem, the state has chosen to punish the very people who have followed the law.
The deeper injury inflicted here is not physical. It is the injury of humiliation, of mistrust, and of being forced repeatedly to prove a disability to a system that refuses to believe its own documents. Doctors expect solidarity from fellow doctors. But in these Mumbai hospitals, disabled doctors found themselves abandoned, interrogated, and stripped of dignity by their own institutions.
In the years to come, when conversations about disability rights in India are revisited, this moment will be remembered as a turning point. It will be cited as the time when great hospitals failed their own people, when ethics surrendered to bureaucracy, and when disability justice was trampled by administrative ignorance. And perhaps, it will also be remembered as the moment that catalysed change. Because no doctor, no employee, and no human being should ever be forced to climb two flights of stairs to prove their disability to an institution that already knows the truth.
Maharashtra now has a new chief secretary — if only for a year — but he brings with him years of experience as the former Secretary of the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities at the Centre. The question is whether he will use his authority to arrest this moral decline or allow this moment to pass without action.
Dr Satendra Singh is a medical doctor and Director-Professor at University College of Medical Sciences & GTB Hospital, New Delhi. He tweets @drsitu. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)