Despite the Indian state’s commitment to education for all, many groups of children find themselves marginalised from educational spaces. While it is now acknowledged that children with disabilities are one such highly marginalised group and have received policy and research attention, children who have disabled family members often remain invisible within these discussions. In the absence of a formal care policy in India, where care is organised within families and shaped by cis-heteropatriarchy, the conceptualisation of access demands an understanding of the interdependent nature of lives and how marginalities are shaped not only by disability but also close proximity to disability. This article analyses the narratives of adult children of mothers with psychosocial disabilities to highlight the barriers to school access experienced because of invisible, familial disabilities. Further, by paying attention to these everyday experiences of schooling of marginalised and invisibilised childhoods, the article problematises the assumptions around which modern schooling is organised. The article argues that centring disabilities and interdependence within educational access debates provide opportunities for challenging norms essential to disability justice as well as broader access to education for all.

Drawing on feminist disability studies, critical caste scholarship, and the disability justice framework, this article examines how caste, class, and gender intersect to shape care futures for ageing adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in contemporary India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted predominantly in Bangalore, India between 2024 and 2025, including life history interviews with parents of adults with IDD, this article analyses the cultural logics and material conditions organizing decision-making around long-term residential care. It argues that under neoliberal conditions in India, where the commodification of care has accompanied the consistent reduction of state social provision, newly emerging private residential facilities reproduce rather than challenge existing caste and class hierarchies. Through a close analysis of two life history interviews with mothers of adults with IDD, this article demonstrates how dietary norms, religious practice, and idioms of “shared culture” function as caste codes structuring belonging within these facilities. It further shows that the gender of the adult with IDD—particularly the heightened vulnerability of disabled daughters to sexual violence—shapes the form that class privilege takes in securing care.

For India to meet the sustainable development goals for disability inclusion, realizing disability justice through universal accessibility for persons with disabilities (PwDs) is essential. Universal access guarantees equitable access for PwDs and ensures their just inclusion in mainstream society. India’s National Sample Survey reveals that a significant number of Indian citizens harbour a disability, with a higher prevalence being reported among older adults, among males, and among people living in rural areas, showing that accessibility is as much a matter of justice as of provision. Poverty and disability are intricately connected, and there is evidence of these leading to vulnerability and exclusion from society and the labour force. The lack of reliable public data on accessibility to PwDs in India impairs inclusion, with some of the challenges being in defining disability and recognition of stigma and exclusions. Poor implementation of well-meaning policies and inappropriate budgetary spending further exacerbate this. Achieving universal accessibility demands more than legal affirmation; it requires strong political will, sustained financing, and administrative accountability. In the backdrop of the recent Supreme Court ruling on universal accessibility, this exploration discusses the importance of grassroots activism and public policy development that is inclusive and efficient with monitoring and evaluation systems in the policy design phase, such that efficiency and learning are imbibed throughout the development, implementation, and evaluation phases. For this to sustain, achieving accessibility must shift from a legal–technical exercise to a justice-oriented target grounded in the nation-building agenda, with sustained financing and continued grassroots activism.

A Government of India report that reviewed child care institutions (CCIs) in India in 2018 stated that children living in CCIs are subject to multiple restrictions which hinder access to the services and support required to meet essential human needs. This study evaluates three CCIs in West Bengal to understand the constructions of care and also the different interventions undertaken on the development of persons with disabilities and the extent to which they are able to access a standard quality of life and participate in the larger society. Through qualitative analysis of institutional structures, policy frameworks, and caregiver-child interactions, the research highlights how notions of “care,” “protection,” and “vulnerability” are constructed leading to systemic inequalities and marginalization. The findings reveal a complex interplay between institutional policies, resource constraints, and societal attitudes, which collectively shape the lived experiences of these children. Despite robust bureaucratic structures, the implementation of policies often falls short due to inadequate training of caregivers, limited resources, and pervasive stigmatization of disability. This results in varied and sometimes contradictory approaches to care, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of disabled children.

This paper examines street performance by persons with disabilities in urban India as a critical site for rethinking disability justice, value, and public life. It asks how performers with disability, often positioned at the margins of urban economies and cultural recognition, negotiate survival, visibility, and dignity within an ableist city structured around productivity, speed, and normative embodiment. Focusing on Kolkata, the study investigates how street performance functions simultaneously as economic labour, cultural practice, and ethical critique under conditions of neoliberal urbanism. Employing a qualitative methodology of performance ethnography and semi-structured interviews, the analysis interprets street performance as a form of cultural labour and crip critique. The central argument is that these performers are not passive victims but active agents whose “imperfect” performances expose the ableist, capitalist, and casteist foundations of urban space, which equate human worth with productivity, aesthetic polish, and bodily normativity. The body of the paper explores how performers confront hostile infrastructure, public charity, and aesthetic dismissal while their improvisational acts foreground interdependence and challenge norms of self-sufficiency. The study concludes that disability justice in the Indian context necessitates moving beyond inclusion rhetoric to demand a fundamental reimagining of urban ethics which looks forward to collective responsibility for access, a revaluation of care, and the recognition of street performance as legitimate cultural work.

This paper draws on feminist disability scholarship on care to examine the figure of a sacrificial mother located within the moral unit of family, which is identified as central to the public discourse of disability around the Kasargod-endosulfan episode. It is an instance of pesticide poisoning that resulted in the acquisition of disabilities by the populations living in the region. The paper argues that the figure of the sacrificial mother who forsakes her job and social life is discursively constructed by feminised notions of care, absence of formal care structures, and the state’s imagination of care as a packageable/givable product. Caregiving has often been thought of as a linear process or mobilised as a moral force to organise familial structures or care containments. By reflecting on the ethnographic fieldnotes and interviews with mothers of endosulfan-affected people at a private care home in the Indian state of Kerala, the study attempts to locate ways in which disability-care destabilises these containments. It also deliberates on the possibilities of socialities and solidarities enabled by disability-care, forming newer spatialities.

Contemporary scholarship rarely questions the expectation of gratitude in asymmetrical relationships, such as those between institutional structures and persons with disabilities, where refusal is difficult. This dynamic organises dependence and constrains choice in the Indian context, where access to education, welfare, and institutional accommodation is often contingent, negotiated, and unevenly realised. From the perspective of moral economy, affect theory, and disability studies, gratitude operates as a form of moral governance, not through overt coercion but through affective compliance. It is not simply expressed as a voluntary emotion but rather as a social performance, read as evidence of deservingness. This demand is not uniformly distributed; rather, its intensity flows through the faultlines of caste, class, gender, and religion such that the capacity to withhold gratitude is itself structured by power. This article argues that when gratitude lies not in its presence but in its necessity, and when appreciation becomes a condition of access, gratitude ceases to be a virtue and instead functions as the quiet consolidation of inequality.

What is access and how has accessibility—as a perceptual frame, a discourse, a box to check, and a relationship—infiltrated our everyday lives and become a means for adjudicating whether we live in inhabitable worlds in India and internationally? This article draws from a roundtable discussion at a 2024 disability studies and disability justice conference held in Kolkata, India, as well as interviews and participant observation conducted with disabled Indians to explore the meanings of access and to think about alternative concepts or frameworks that are used instead.

This article intervenes in Indian disability justice through a case study of Assamese poet Alakesh Kalita, who lived with schizophrenia. Shifting focus from public activism to private, relational solidarity, it examines spaces shaped by care, intimacy, and affective labour. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ephemera as evidence, the study analyses Kalita’s writings as a crip archive of endurance. These ephemera resist neoliberal demands for productivity and coherence, recording modes of living with psychiatric disability without seeking narrative resolution. Foregrounding uneven mental healthcare infrastructures, the article highlights the centrality of informal care networks in India, where support often relies on family and community rather than institutional systems. Kalita’s life and work were sustained through such kinships and literary solidarities. Crucially, Kalita’s poetry exceeds diagnostic registers. Rooted in Assamese cultural memory, his poems utilize metaphor and spiritual imagery to render psychic pain without reducing it to pathology. Ultimately, the article proposes a disability justice grounded in care and attentiveness rather than recovery or moral resolution. By treating his poetic traces as vital evidence, the study argues for a relational model of justice that honours Kalita within the enduring social scaffold of the domestic and literary realm.