THE RAMP THAT ENDS AT THE EDGE

Somewhere in Himachal sits a ramp that a corporate donor built, photographed, and forgot. Dr Sangeeta Thakur, a disability rights advocate and founder of Ashtavakra Accessibility Solutions, found it on a hillside, ending fifty metres from a steep drop. “The ramp was never about the person meant to use it,” she said. It was, in her phrase, a “logoed ramp”: the most visible feature of accessibility, and therefore the one everybody builds. Himanshi Sardana, who lives with cerebral palsy and is Partner Servicing Manager at Saarathee CRM has documented the same pattern from Delhi. “Ramps are everywhere,” she says. “But how many are accessible?” She describes a restaurant where the ramp existed, but a car blocked it.

That is how corporate India engages with disability: conspicuous where there is a photograph to be taken, absent where it counts.

In May 2026, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs expanded Schedule VII of the Companies Act to allow CSR funds to flow through the Social Stock Exchange, where nonprofits raise funds. The signal is one of ambition. But for an estimated ten crore persons with disabilities- some estimates put the figure far higher- ambition has never translated into proportionate investment. Census 2011 counts them at 2.21 per cent of the population, barely two crore, against global prevalence closer to 16 per cent by the World Health Organisation. The undercount is not a footnote. You cannot fund what you have not counted. The World Bank estimates India loses roughly 3-7 per cent of GDP each year to the exclusion of disability. That is not welfare arithmetic. It is a macroeconomic leak.

The figures that look generous dissolve on inspection. In 2023–24, corporate India spent ₹34,909 crore on CSR. The largest slice, ₹12,216 crore, went to a category labelled “education, differently abled and livelihoods,” according to the MCA’s National CSR Portal. Disability is not a standalone head. It is bundled with general schooling. A company can fund fifty ordinary primary schools and report full compliance, without funding a single accessible toilet, or Braille and sign-language instruction. The NSS 76th Round, from 2018 and still the most recent official survey, found fewer than one in four working-age disabled persons in employment. Disability-specific investment has never been at a scale that could move that number. That newer data does not exist is itself a governance failure.

The deeper problem is that the law rewards the wrong things. Under Rule 4(5) of the CSR Rules, spending that benefits a company’s own employees is excluded from CSR. The logic is defensible: firms should not pass off routine expenses as philanthropy. The effect is perverse. A company that installs ramps or screen readers for disabled staff cannot count a rupee. A wheelchair camp in a distant district counts in full. So one law undercuts another. The RPwD Act, 2016 requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation. The CSR framework penalises exactly that. Charity is subsidised. Inclusion is not.

This distortion runs through the ecosystem. Staff salaries, often 60 per cent of a disability NGO’s costs, are rarely funded. Philanthropy prefers twelve-month projects to the slower, institutional work disability requires. David Absalom, Executive Secretary of Blind Relief Association, Delhi, notes that only one company has ever agreed to fund staff salaries as a standalone organizational expense, rather than supporting salary costs as part of the broader operational expenses of a regular year-long project.

The corporate case deserves a hearing. Dr. Amanpreet Kaur, national CSR head at Bajaj Finserv, argues spending priorities cannot be mandated, and India’s CSR pool is better suited to pilots than system-wide solutions. She is candid about why disability slips through: Schedule VII does not name it. Sardana illustrates the cost of that gap. A wheelchair manufacturer approached CSR departments with a model linking mobility aids to last-mile employment. It was declined. It did not fit the checklist. Good intentions, she notes, still take months of documentation to become a rupee moved.

If the pot is small, spend it as structure, not spectacle. SBI, the Nifty 50’s largest employer of persons with disabilities at over 5,000 workers (Statista, 2023), has shown job-fit investment pays off. A 2015 American India Foundation study of 105 companies, including hospitality and manufacturing firms, found that employees with disabilities matched or exceeded productivity benchmarks. Some firms now hire into mid- and senior-level roles, not token positions, and inclusion, where it has been tried seriously, tends to stay. Inclusion, done right, is not charity. It is a balance sheet that improves.

The problem is not scarcity. It is design. In mineral-rich Jharkhand, District Mineral Foundations funnel the bulk of high-priority spending into drinking water; disability welfare, a mandated head under the same rules, gets a fraction (CSEP, 2021). Four changes would begin to fix this, though none is self-executing. A standalone Schedule VII category requires an amendment to the Companies Act. DEPwD has already asked for one, and a wider coalition making the same case would carry more weight than one department’s letter. Outcome budgeting needs monitoring capacity most implementers lack; a realistic start is the top 1,000 listed companies already required to file BRSR disclosures, where a disability line could be added. Ring-fencing institutional costs cuts against funders’ preference for project-tied grants; it needs to sit inside the CSR Rules as a requirement, the way Rule 4(5) already dictates what does not count. Panchayat audits have no legal hook for CSR yet, but NSAP pensions already run through Gram Sabha grievance channels; extending that machinery is more workable than inventing a new one. Require disabled persons’ organisations to co-design and audit projects locally, so outcomes are not defined by funders alone. Sardana puts it simply: “I am not commenting on whether the budget size is right. I am more interested in the accountability and visibility of the budget being given.” That is what all four changes are about.

India ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007 and codified it in the RPwD Act, 2016. Accessibility is not charity. It is an entitlement.

Fixing this will not take more money. It will take insisting that spending and accountability are the same thing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sanskriti Agrawal is a GRAAM Embark India Development Fellow placed at the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities. Her research focuses on disability-inclusive public policy, budgeting, corporate governance, and implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.

Author: Sanskriti Agrawal, GRAAM Embark India Development Fellow at the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities.

Mentored by: Honourable Commissioner, Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities(CCPD), Dr Balu I and Mr Kiran Rajashekariah.