Accessibility Barriers in Vidarbha: Daily Struggles of the Disabled

thenewsdirt
Sep 11
8 min read

Basic infrastructure in Vidarbha often remains hostile to people with disabilities, making routine mobility a challenge. Even in Nagpur, the region’s largest city, footpaths and public buildings are largely unaccommodating.

An accessibility survey found that more than half of Nagpur’s road stretches have no disability provisions, and only about 9% of footpaths are accessible to wheelchair users. Encroached or broken pavements force those on crutches or in wheelchairs into traffic. Essential public facilities fare no better. As recently as 2011, the Nagpur civic authority could not name a single government building that was fully accessible for the disabled.

This shortfall spurred court interventions: in one case, the Bombay High Court demanded audits after finding many major buildings lacked even a working ramp or accessible toilet.

Public transport is similarly ill-equipped. City buses in Nagpur traditionally have steep three-step entries, effectively barring independent access for wheelchair users. Local activists had to lobby for retrofitting these buses with fold-out ramps and lower steps to meet legal accessibility standards.

While a few newer low-floor buses were introduced, they remain limited in number and routes, leaving most disabled commuters dependent on assistance or costly private transport. Rail travel poses hurdles, too, with many stations' high platforms and scant boarding support.

In stark contrast, the new Nagpur Metro system has become a rare bright spot. Every station features ramps, lifts, tactile floor paths for the visually impaired, and dedicated wheelchair spaces on trains. The Metro’s usage by over 2,200 disabled riders in a year suggests that when infrastructure is designed for inclusion, people respond enthusiastically. Beyond public systems, even personal mobility aids are unevenly distributed. A local entrepreneur noted that Vidarbha lags behind other regions in access to modern assistive devices.

Powered wheelchair-scooter attachments have reached far fewer users here than in states like Tamil Nadu, where government programmes fund them. This disparity means many in Vidarbha remain literally immobile in their communities, waiting for supportive technologies that elsewhere are increasingly common.

Employment Hurdles and Welfare Gaps

For most disabled residents of Vidarbha, earning a livelihood and securing social support is an uphill battle. The region’s economy offers few suitable jobs for people with mobility, visual, or hearing impairments, and workplace stigma persists.

Recognising the high unemployment, the Maharashtra government recently partnered with an NGO to connect disabled youths in Vidarbha with skill training and corporate job opportunities.

Under this 2025 initiative, “Youth for Jobs”, the state is also rolling out a drive to register every person with a disability and issue them a Unique Disability ID card (UDID). The UDID system is meant to streamline access to entitlements, from scholarships to rehabilitation aid. It fills a critical gap; until now, less than half of Indians with disabilities even possessed the official certificate needed to claim benefits. By creating a unified database, officials hope to reach isolated rural pockets of Vidarbha where disabled individuals have often been invisible in welfare records.

Yet documentation alone cannot overcome the daily hardships of poverty. Disability pensions in Maharashtra are nominal, and payments are unreliable.

The main social security scheme offers just ₹1,000 per month to eligible disabled adults, an amount unchanged for years. Activists point out that this barely covers basic needs. In fact, disability groups in Vidarbha have petitioned for the pension to be increased sixfold to ₹6,000, calling the current sum insufficient for a life of dignity. Even those meagre pensions often arrive months late due to bureaucratic delays.

Recent investigations highlight chronic lapses where elderly and disabled beneficiaries in Vidarbha have gone for long stretches without their promised stipends. Such gaps force families to either incur debt or forgo essentials. Other government supports that could improve economic inclusion, subsidised assistive devices, soft loans, or job reservations, frequently fail to reach the grassroots in this region.

A central fund existed to provide motorised tricycles and e-rickshaws to disabled persons, but Vidarbha’s activists say they have seen little of it on the ground.

This has driven disability rights groups to make bold demands. At a protest in Nagpur, they sought government grants of motorised e-rickshaws every three years so that people with disabilities can both gain mobility and earn a livelihood as drivers. They also urged authorities to reserve small shop spaces near bus hubs specifically for disabled entrepreneurs and to raise the cap on low-interest business loans for disabled self-help groups.

These appeals underscore that many disabled Vidarbhians remain shut out of the mainstream economy, surviving via informal work or family support. Without stronger policy intervention and consistent delivery, the promise of empowerment through “Skill India” and other programmes rings hollow in these communities.

Education and Social Inclusion Challenges

The struggle for accessibility in Vidarbha extends into schools and social life, starting from childhood. Inclusive education, integrating children with disabilities into regular schools, is still more ideal than reality.

Many government schools lack the basic infrastructure and support needed for disabled students.

State data show that as of the mid-2010s, over 18,000 schools in Maharashtra did not have a ramp for wheelchair access, and more than half had no disabled-friendly toilet facilities. In practice, this means a child using a wheelchair in a village school may have to be carried up stairs, or a visually impaired student might find no Braille materials or special educator available. While policies under the Right to Education Act mandate barrier-free access and non-discrimination, implementation in Vidarbha’s towns and rural districts has been slow.

As a result, many parents opt to send children with profound disabilities to special residential schools. However, conditions in those specialised institutions are also under strain. In late 2024, teachers and staff from several schools for hearing, visually, and intellectually impaired children in Vidarbha staged a protest to highlight neglect by authorities.

Over 50 staff and supporters marched to demand overdue salaries and basic facility upgrades for these institutions. They described how some teachers had been working on half pay for years due to funding delays. “We have been demanding fair wages for years, but nothing has been done,” one frustrated special educator in Nagpur said, noting 15 years of appeals with little government response. The under-resourcing of such schools directly affects the children, it leads to teacher shortages, minimal therapy or counselling services, and dilapidated infrastructure in hostels and classrooms.

Social attitudes further complicate the picture, especially in the rural heartland of Vidarbha. Deep-rooted stigma and lack of awareness about disabilities can isolate individuals from community life.

Advocacy groups recount cases where families, unsure how to support a child with a developmental disability, have kept the child indoors for fear of ridicule or harm. In extreme instances, borne out by rural studies, some desperate caregivers even resorted to restraining children with severe intellectual disabilities at home due to a lack of professional help or respite care.

Such incidents are a harsh reminder that, beyond physical infrastructure, social inclusion remains a distant goal.

Disability advocates in Vidarbha stress the need for community-based rehabilitation and public education campaigns to change mindsets. Positive steps are being taken by local NGOs – for example, outreach programs in villages to educate parents on disability management, and initiatives like the “Divyang Mitra” (friends of the disabled), which pair volunteers with disabled residents to assist them in daily tasks.

These efforts, though small in scale, aim to chip away at the silence and social barriers that often surround disability in rural areas. Until schools, workplaces, and public spaces across Vidarbha truly welcome persons with disabilities, many will continue to feel like outsiders in their own hometowns.

Calls for Change and Slow Policy Response

Facing these compounded barriers, Vidarbha’s disabled community and their allies have increasingly been speaking out. Public protests and legal actions have emerged as tools to push for long-overdue changes.

The winter session of the Maharashtra legislature in Nagpur has become a focal point for disability rights demonstrations.

During one such demonstration, over a hundred people with disabilities from across Vidarbha converged to voice a litany of unmet needs.

They presented an extensive charter of demands, higher monthly pensions, removal of age limits on assistance, free distribution of mobility aids, designated parking and market stalls for disabled individuals, and even a fresh disability census to gather accurate data for policymaking.

This rare show of collective solidarity was a culmination of years of frustration. Protest leaders noted that many of the issues highlighted (from inaccessible infrastructure to scant economic support) had been raised repeatedly with successive governments, but with little tangible progress. While state officials did meet with delegations from the protestors and promise to review the petitions, concrete action remains painstakingly slow. The persistence of such advocacy, some of it stretching back decades, indicates how deeply entrenched the accessibility gap is in Vidarbha.

Officials argue that they have started moving in the right direction, albeit gradually. In Nagpur, political leaders have unveiled a few showcase projects, such as the Anubhuti Inclusive Park, a sprawling “Divyang” park opened in 2024 as a recreational and skill development space tailored for disabled visitors.

The park features adapted play equipment, sensory gardens, and two dedicated buses to ferry disabled students from their schools. Likewise, state authorities announced a plan to roll out wheelchair-accessible electric rickshaws in every sub-district, aiming to improve mobility options in smaller towns and rural areas. These initiatives reflect a growing official acknowledgement of the problem.

Maharashtra’s government has also aligned with national mandates by conducting accessibility audits and beginning to retrofit some public buildings under the Accessible India Campaign.

Still, activists underscore that policy pronouncements have yet to fully translate into everyday reality.

Even the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which expands legal protections and requirements for accessibility, is not robustly enforced at the local level.

A former state chief minister candidly admitted that despite many progressive laws on paper, implementation on the ground has been “far from satisfactory”. This implementation gap is keenly felt in Vidarbha. Each small victory, such as a ramp added to a courthouse or an inclusive hiring drive by a company in Nagpur, comes after sustained pressure. Disability advocates continue to use tools like Public Interest Litigations and media exposés to hold authorities accountable.

They emphasise that accessibility is not a privilege but a basic right, one that millions of Indian citizens in regions like Vidarbha are still struggling to attain. The hope is that with relentless advocacy and incremental policy gains, the coming years will see Vidarbha’s cities and villages become places where a disability no longer means a life confined by environmental and societal barriers.