Rethinking access to India's courts

Mandatory practice requirements and inaccessible court infrastructure stall the promise of an inclusive judiciary

Picture a bright law graduate and wheelchair user who dominated every moot court competition in law school, aspiring to join the Indian Judicial Service, only to be barred by a mandatory requirement demanding three years’ practice in courts with rigid infrastructure and inflexible surroundings.

The Bhumika Trust case follows closely on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling in All India Judges Association and others v. Union of India and others, which prescribes mandatory three years’ practice at the bar to acquire eligibility to appear in judicial examinations. The petition in Bhumika Trust argues that this mandatory requirement discriminates against aspirants with disabilities and creates employment barriers.

While the mandatory requirement stems from the Court’s intention to provide aspirants with practical litigation experience, the case raises several constitutional and logistical concerns.

In Vikash Kumar v. UPSC, the Supreme Court reshaped the principle of reasonable accommodation into the State’s positive obligation. The Court emphasised that reasonable differentiation, as a primary constituent of equality, recognises the dissimilar needs of persons with disabilities, forging the way for substantive equality. More recently, the Court reaffirmed this duty, noting that reasonable accommodation for one can enhance the overall access for all.

In 2024, the Supreme Court’s Accessibility Report offered a glimpse into the Court’s functional and infrastructural accessibility. On a similar tangent, PACTA released an Access to Justice Report in 2025 that reflects the woeful gaps in the accessibility of infrastructure in India’s high courts. The report suggests a general absence of data on the availability and functionality of lifts and ramps across high courts, and no mechanism exists to monitor compliance with accessibility standards. This report is based on Principle 2 of the 2020 UN Principles and Guidelines on Access to Justice for Persons with Disabilities, which calls for universally accessible facilities and services to ensure equal access to justice without discrimination.

The infrastructural gaps discussed in the PACTA report and in Bhumika Trust result in structural limitations. These limitations reveal the judiciary’s willingness to hire, despite its reticence to adapt its physical framework, making reasonable accommodation a systematic precondition for inclusion in the profession itself. Given that the Supreme Court has tried to lay down comprehensive jurisprudence on uniform accessibility and reasonable accommodation in recent years, the Bhumika Trust case exposes the Court’s anxiety and its reluctant ableism in balancing uniform judicial standards against demands for inclusion.

This intersection of accessibility in courts and equality is central to the legitimacy of the judiciary, not just a peripheral concern. Andrea Parente writes that a framework achieves disability specialisation when elements of disability justice needs are included and represented, requiring systems to learn from the intended beneficiaries of such infrastructure.

However, reasonable accommodation has mostly been treated as an add-on requirement rather than a foundational necessity. Thus, there is a need to move beyond the narrow construction of disability specialisation. Bhumika Trust emphasises Parente’s key insight: without judicial systems learning from the lived experiences of disability, court spaces will remain welcoming in theory but inaccessible in practice.

Substantive equality

The capabilities approach states that people lead an effective life when they can do and be what they value. However, if everyone must achieve equality of capability, each person must have the same equality of opportunity. This approach reveals the gap between formal and substantive equality in Bhumika Trust.

On substantive equality, Sandra Fredman argues for valuing identity differences rather than forcing assimilation to dominant norms. This warrants systemic transformation to accommodate diverse needs. The argument also alludes to persons with disabilities holding multiple marginalised identities. Hence, notions of substantive equality must be genuinely incorporated when issuing such mandatory requirements.

The Bhumika Trust case is a stark reminder that without accessible infrastructure, rights remain an abstract and distant dream. The role of the judiciary is not only to equip the new generation of lawyers with the practical nitty-gritty of the profession, but also to engage with the limitations entrenched within the system. However, this underscores the urgent need to transform court systems to expand real freedoms and adapt their structures to diverse identities and bodies.

In that endeavour, inclusion demands transformation and not just tokenism. Such efforts warrant the co-creation of solidarities of awareness, allyship, and collective responsibility, moving beyond cultures of empathy to actively redesigning legal spaces and reshaping our understanding of them.

(The writer teaches law at the O P Jindal Global University)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.