In November 2024, I attended a lively interdisciplinary disability studies and disability justice conference at the Institute for Development Studies in Kolkata, attended by disability scholars and community activists from Kolkata and elsewhere in India. In this essay, I describe the conference as a space in which the organizers endeavored to create accessibility, and I also discuss a roundtable discussion held at the conference in which activists and scholars talked about their understandings of what the concept of access means and does in an Indian context. The goal of the conference roundtable—and of this Public Humanities commentary—was and is to “provincialize” accessibility and to consider other concepts that surface in and animate the everyday life of disabled Indians.Footnote ¹ The concept of accessibility, as spoken and written in English, has become normalized, at least in urban middle class spaces, and it is also used by the state: the central government’s Accessible India Campaign is an example of this.Footnote ²

There are, however, other concepts that people in India use, concepts such as “disability friendly,” “disability sensitive,” and “comfortable” as examples. As Cassandra Hartblay points out, it is important to attend to “access vernaculars” to understand how understandings of access are situated in space, place, and time.Footnote ³ Such vernaculars tell us about the specificities of disability worlds in different places.Footnote ⁴ Increasingly, the concepts access and accessibility mean everything and nothing. And we also need to consider contexts in which people simply do not use the concept of access at all. In what ways does focusing on the presence and absence of access obscure both peoples’ experiences and meaning making of and around these experiences? An interrogation of what access means and does, juridically, relationally, and colloquially, is important for understanding everyday disabled experiences and aspirations in India and elsewhere, experiences and aspirations that may not map onto access.

Returning to the Kolkata conference: in terms of the built infrastructure, the conference was held in an academic institution with elevators and accessible bathrooms. Beyond the built environment, the conference organizers thought about accessibility measures in advance. They asked participants about their accessibility needs and arranged for access copies, printed copies of talks being read, to be available for attendees and participants reading along with the talks. Notably, this was the first academic conference in India that I had attended in which there was attention to access beyond the built environment and where the organizers checked in with participants about what they might need. To be fair, accessibility is not prioritized or planned for at most academic conferences internationally, unless they are disability-focused conferences, beyond ensuring that a space is physically accessible. And the idea that conferences can be adjusted or tweaked and that people might have physical, sensory, or psychosocial needs is relatively new. (People are ostensibly supposed to be able to sit in conference rooms listening to papers and talks for long days under fluorescent lights without complaint or concern. Academic ableism is real.)

On the first morning of the two-day conference, the organizers made an introductory announcement in which they affirmed their commitment to providing access and they asked participants to approach them if they needed anything. And then, despite this access commitment, glitches started happening: we could not activate closed captions on the version of PowerPoint (PPT) used on the main conference computer; then the internet did not work on another computer with a newer version of PPT; and then much tinkering with computers did not yield any success. Another participant tried to pull up a web-based version of PPT and that also failed. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly (although I am against creating hierarchies of access requirements), the conference organizers and several attendees realized that a blind scholar, one of the keynote speakers, had not made it from the hotel where he was staying to the conference venue, a two-minute walk away. Someone was dispatched to quickly bring him to the venue. Once he arrived, there were apologies and there were also giggles and smiles. He may have been left behind for a few minutes but once he arrived, he was quickly folded into the rich social and intellectual camaraderie of the conference and Indian disability studies spaces. This folding in was also a form of access.

The captioning went in and out all that first morning and for the rest of the conference. But even though I use captioning, I did not mind.Footnote ⁵ On one hand, the conference was permeated by what we could call access fails and on the other hand there were all kinds of access enactments and repairs that were happening on a personal level as people enthusiastically interacted with each other as valued people and worked to create interpersonal scaffolds that could enable access or at least make up for its absence. These scaffolds might not have prevented people from being left behind in a hotel room for a few minutes, but they did prevent people from being disregarded. And when I wrote to the blind scholar, Hemachandran Karah, in April 2025 to ask him about his perspective on the conference and what he remembered about being left in his hotel room, he wrote: “Actually, I was not left alone at all. It was such a well-organised conference. Kudos to them!” He then continued: “Slight delays, slippages, and round-about solutions need not be treated as acts of abandonment. That way, I was having a room of one’s own. A dry joke from a fellow DS ally!” This conference and other experiences in Indian disability worlds stressed to me the importance of interpersonal and relational connections in creating conditions of possibility for being present and working together, regardless of whether technical access was there. An evaluation of technical access was not the sole way of adjudicating the accessibility of the conference.

My experience at this Kolkata conference also reminded me of a Delhi-based disability rights workshop in which I participated in 2016, where there were sign language interpreters. Afterwards, I spoke with the conference organizers who were non-disabled and worked for an Indian disability organization, about the low numbers of qualified sign language interpreters in India, and I asked how they would have planned for the conference in the absence of sign language interpreters. This hypothetical absence is often the norm at Indian disability conferences. Their reply was that they would do some kind of jugaad or engage in a makeshift workaround as a solution in the moment. I was skeptical at the time and said something like “Sign language interpreting requires skill and cannot be jugaad. Access cannot be provided through jugaad!” I am not sure I believe my statement is true anymore and/but I also believe that it is possible that disability communities and disability scholars (including myself!) have become overly focused on access and that access as an end point has become prescriptively teleological even when scholars stress its open-endedness and the importance of seeing it as a horizon toward which we work.

I have also been thinking more about whether access can be jugaad and whether jugaad can be access. Jonathan Ventura and Shilpa Das write: “Jugaad has become an essential tool for many disabled people in India to navigate a world that is often not designed with their needs in mind. ‘Disability jugaad’ refers to adaptive, creative, and often self-engineered solutions devised by disabled people, often outside formal design ecosystems, to overcome environmental, economic, and infrastructural barriers in a society that does not design for them. Unlike mainstream jugaad, which is often celebrated for its marketable innovation potential, ‘disability jugaad’ emerges from a politics of survival.”Footnote ⁶ What is key in this definition of “disability jugaad” is that it is disabled people themselves engaged in practices and not non-disabled people doing it for or to them.Footnote ⁷

My initial skeptical response to the non-disabled conference organizers almost ten years ago was motivated by the fact that these were two non-disabled people talking about doing jugaad and not disabled people themselves. In addition, jugaad in the context of sign language interpreting is an inferior work-around in a situation in which there clearly is a solution: a skilled Indian Sign Language interpreter, and such interpreters do exist in Delhi. (And what would jugaad be in the case of not having a sign language interpreter? Would it be a notetaker? Speech to text? Would we consider these things to be jugaad? Are they “good enough”?) However, considering jugaad as providing access where there are no solutions, I think about how in September 2025, I spent time in a university disability resource center in Mumbai where a staff member showed me with great pride some of the jugaad that they had done at the center to make printed math worksheets accessible to blind students; in the absence of other ways of making this material accessible, their jugaad made sense to me. The problem is when jugaad is done in lieu of providing access. And this begs the question of the relationship of jugaad to access.

We need to explore what we mean when we say that access can be provided through jugaad and what this assertion means for our definition of access. On one hand, access is a universalized juridical and legal framework with boxes to check, measurements to make and register, and policies and laws to follow. Access is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “The power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something; admittance; admission.” This is the definition of access utilized in India’s disability laws of 1995 and 2016. It is also the framework utilized in the recent landmark decision handed down in a 2024 lawsuit, Rajive Raturi v. Union of India. In this lawsuit, Rajive Raturi, a Blind plaintiff, sued the central government regarding the slow progress made on accessibility to the built environment and in institutional and policy spaces since the passage of the country’s disability laws. In response, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that there must be mandatory minimum accessibility standards and accessibility should be a mandated floor and not a ceiling. According to the lawsuit judgment, previous laws and guidelines did not go far enough in mandating and enforcing accessibility, and more than this, accessibility needs to be thought about beyond ramps and considered in aspects of everyday life, from the built environment to education to information technology. This ruling came out in Autumn 2024, and there have been many conversations, including a keynote presentation at the 2024 Kolkata conference, about the stakes of this ruling and what it might mean for disability communities to be involved in deciding what this mandatory minimum is as well as how to enforce its implementation. What is revealing about this ruling, for now, is that it highlights that there is currently no mandatory floor. Without a floor, people can and do sink. (And this is perhaps where jugaad has come in although it begs the question of what kind of jugaad you can do with no infrastructure, no ceiling or floor, whatsoever.)

Beyond policies and laws, activists and scholars have stressed that access is and occurs within interpersonal relationships; Mia Mingus writes about access intimacy as that feeling that people get when they understand each other’s access needs, and Alice Wong insists that access is love.Footnote ⁸ Mingus writes: “For me, I understand Access Intimacy as something that can transform ordinary access into a tool for liberation, instead of merely reinforcing “inclusion” and “equality.””Footnote ⁹ And this key here—the question of access to what, why, and how? When is access in the service of maintaining the status quo versus creating new possibilities for world making and being together? Returning to the Raturi case, why do we want a floor in an already fixed building structure? I think about John Lee Clark’s missive against the concept of access in which he writes:

Clark is writing about the global North. In the locations in which I have spent time in India, there are no Braille menus or street posts that vibrate, and there may not be ramps or elevators. However, there are people who offer help and support and who become infrastructure and affordances to disabled friends, colleagues, family members, comrades, and even strangers.Footnote ¹¹ It seems to me that Clark, following Mingus, is asking important questions about the limits of access and the kinds of normative structures and processes providing access upholds. In a critical vein as well, Aimi Hamraie offered up a new field called “critical access studies” which “challenges the treatment of access as a ‘self-evident good’.”Footnote ¹² I also think about Hartblay’s definition of access: “Access is many things. It is the inclusion of minority or stigmatized groups in social and political life. It is an unhindered physical and material movement through space. It is a relational concept of interactions between complex networks of heterogeneous actors. These core ideas of disability access build on precepts developed through disabled people’s advocacy and activism in design and architecture, and extending into political advocacy and the dynamics of sensory and social life.”Footnote ¹³ I think here of a comment by Hemachandran Karah: “It is not always easy to slot in what you call ‘Accessibility workers’ merely as such. Most often they are, and may become friends, well-wishers, and accessibility-literate comrades.” Hemachandran’s statement makes me think of the value of friends and comrades.

All these aspects of access are what I have been trying to make sense of, namely, how to square that access is both juridical-legal and interpersonal? Both mundane and utopic? Both a box to check and expansive perception?Footnote ¹⁴ In order to think about these tensions and the circulation of access talk and access meaning making in India, I draw from conversations started at the 2024 conference roundtable and continued during summer 2025 with Kuhu Das, a feminist disability researcher and consultant; Nandini Ghosh, a disability studies scholar and sociology professor; and Snigdha Sarkar, a parent of a deaf adult and the founder of a parents’ organization working toward the empowerment and education of parents of deaf and hearing impaired children.Footnote ¹⁵ These three accessibility experts are also members of a Kolkata-based disability rights organization. Going forward, I provide an overview of our discussions, particularly the nuances and concerns that were raised.

Kuhu stressed to me that disability access cannot be thought about in isolation, and class, caste, and gender are important; intersectionality is key. She pointed out that disabled people who are wealthy generally have more access in everyday life than poor people whose access to education, public space, health care, employment, and so on are more limited. She brought up the example of parents of a disabled child who are daily wage earners: how can these parents afford to take a day off from work to take their child to medical appointments? How can these parents search for an accessible school for their child? Such families need to consider issues of survival, and there is a hierarchy of needs that must be accounted for and negotiated. In addition to economics and class, Kuhu pointed out that when we think about accessibility, we must think about peoples’ support needs. She said that it is easier to think about accessibility for people with lower support needs and that in situations in which a person has higher support needs, accessibility needs are distributed among family members who become sources of support. And finally, she told me that when she talks with disabled people about access, she does not use the concept of access but rather concepts like comfortable, easy, and useful. As she poignantly stressed to me, systems and structures have not been developed for the comfort of people from marginalized backgrounds. Because of this structural ableism, she always asks “what would make it easier for people?” By “it,” she means navigating through infrastructural and policy landscapes that are not designed with and for disabled people and which routinely make navigation more difficult for disabled people from marginalized caste, class, and religious backgrounds, in addition to gender. At a September 2025 disability rights group meeting, for example, Kuhu spoke eloquently about help desks at public hospitals in Kolkata that were not welcoming or helpful to disabled people; people staffing these desks were hostile and went out of their way to openly not create conditions of accessibility for disabled patients and family members. An inaccessible help desk, help that is not accessible.

Nandini Ghosh reflected on accessibility as a requirement that changes over the life course; as she pointed out, the needs of children are different than the needs of adults because children are expected to be dependent while adults are supposed to become more independent, although the concept of independence must be nuanced in an Indian context, in which, as she notes: “accessibility comes to represent a curious mix of dependence, independence, and interdependence.” One might, of course, think about who has the privilege of being dependent and being taken care of and upon whom care burdens fall.Footnote ¹⁶ Nandini stressed that accessibility should ideally enable the development of peoples’ capacities across the life course, and more than this, it is important to see accessibility as relational and attitudinal. She emphasized that “attitudinal access,” here meaning not functioning as a gatekeeper to prevent disabled people from entering education or employment, is important. Attitudinal access means avoiding deficit thinking and instead considering the opportunities that disabled people can be given to participate in daily life, education, and employment. Like Kuhu, Nandini also stressed intersections and noted: “Accessibility in India is also embedded in social attitudes in patriarchal, casteist and ableist structures…” and it is impossible to analyze access apart from these structures.

Finally, Snigdha Sarkar spoke specifically about her perspectives on access from her positionality as a founder of a parent’s association called Anwesha and as a parent of a deaf child, now an adult. When I met her in September 2025, Anwesha had just moved into a new building, in which Snigdha and other administrators are cultivating a homely atmosphere where families feel comfortable spending time and even staying the night after workshops and educational and cultural programs if they live too far away to travel home. Snigdha stresses that families are welcome in all the rooms of the new building, including the kitchen and the patio area, and that Anwesha’s administrators and staff want families to dwell in the space and talk with each other. According to Snigdha, the team does not see religion, class, or caste as a barrier or obstacle in their work. She stressed that anyone with a deaf child can access Anwesha. She said that Anwesha is working to make their trainings as accessible as possible, and in the service of this, they recently started providing training and support online and allowing families to come to events and courses online, even though they did not allow this in the past. She also emphasized the horizontal aspect of the organization and the fact that there is no hierarchy: Snigdha says that the founders and administrators collectively make decisions and that they are open to feedback (although I do not know how families perceive this). Beyond physical access and a horizontal power structure, she said that there is emotional access at Anwesha in that people can speak freely and share what is in their hearts. Parents can create bonds with each other at Anwesha, which is a safe space. In addition, there is access to knowledge and learning at Anwesha, specifically learning techniques for engaging in early intervention, advocating for deaf children in education, and interacting with extended family. At their programs, she said, they also have communication access by providing Bengali and Indian Sign Language interpreters. Snigdha is also passionate about access to newborn hearing screening, which she said is the right of every child, and access to early diagnosis and identification, intervention, and family training and support. She stressed that family training and support should be for everyone in the family so that deaf children feel included in their broader communities such as in schools, weddings, and religious functions, as examples. We talked about how a sense of inclusion is a sense of belonging, that a deaf child should feel like friends, teachers, and community members are accepting her.

In reflecting on these conversations, I am interested in ease, comfort, inclusion, belonging, and openness as synonyms to accessibility. These concepts resonated with other concepts that I learned about during my research in different disability spaces in India: concepts such as help, support, and equal feeling, as examples. I also appreciate the importance of always situating disability accessibility in relation to other forms of difference and marginalization, especially class, caste, religion, and gender. Similarly, I appreciate Snigdha’s insistence that we think about access to diagnosis and services as well as emotional access. In these conversations, participants stressed the importance of thinking about access structurally as well as in relation to the life course and values such as independence, interdependence, and dependence.

Returning to normative access, I am struck by how the most physically accessible spaces in India are the most exclusive spaces: shopping malls, airports, and private social clubs, as example. I remember visiting the Delhi Gymkhana, an elite members-only club, many years ago, and marveling at the fact that there were multiple ramps, accessible toilets, and wheelchairs to borrow; there were also assistants who helped facilitate movement through the club. Yet, this is one of the most exclusive and tightly controlled spaces in India; physical accessibility here needs to be thought in relation to class and caste privilege. I also think about discussions about accessibility on the Indian Railways, specifically around whether having porters available to lift and transport physically disabled people into their train compartments is a form of access or not. Many people told me that this option was an assault to dignity and that it was not access in that access means being able to get into a space or participate without help. There were other disabled people, however, who saw this physical assistance as a form of access; just like we can think of people as infrastructure in the words of AbdouMaliq Simone, we can think of people as access.Footnote ¹⁷

It is certainly the case that demanding access—like demanding rights—has clear moral and political implications. No one wants to be accused of not providing access, and demanding access can also create tensions, impingements, and ruptures in relationships. A focus on technical access or engaging in access compliance work (or box checking) can let actual people “off the hook” and can background interpersonal relations. However, we need to consider both “access vernaculars” and the ways that access as a concept can obscure other forms of relationality and world making. I also think broadly about ecosystems of belonging that include relationships with other people, non-humans, and interworldly actors, spaces, and times: how might these forms of belonging exceed the conceptual lens of access that privileges secular and juridical rationalities? We must learn from people about the concepts and practices that they find useful in creating inhabitable worlds. At the same time, I want there to be more captioning, sign language interpreters, ramps, and useable bathrooms, although these are not endpoints. I do not think this is a contradiction.