Supreme Court tightens disability rights enforcement, hands NLUs a compliance audit role

Nearly eight years after the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 came into force, the Supreme Court on Monday acknowledged that “full and effective compliance by all States and Union Territories remains elusive”, and recast the National Law Universities as institutional auditors of the law's implementation. The order, passed by a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta in the long-running matter Justice Sunanda Bhandare Foundation v. Union of India, addresses three distinct issues that have lingered through multiple hearings — the appointment of Nodal Officers across States, the legal position on upward movement of PwBD candidates, and the broader question of whether the 2016 Act is being implemented at all.

The case

The proceedings trace back to Writ Petition (Civil) No. 116 of 1998, originally filed under the now-repealed Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995, and continued under the 2016 statute that replaced it. A connected appeal, Civil Appeal No. 11938 of 2016, was argued by Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves. Together, the matters have served as the Supreme Court's primary monitoring vehicle for disability rights compliance over more than a quarter-century.

On 12 September 2025, the Court had issued detailed directions requiring every State and Union Territory to appoint a Nodal Officer, who would act as the institutional point of contact for implementation of the 2016 Act and coordination with the National Law Universities tasked with monitoring compliance under what the Court has called Project Ability Empowerment. By the hearing on 15 April 2026, seven months had passed and seventeen jurisdictions — eleven States and six Union Territories — had still not made the appointments. The Court expressed “serious displeasure” at what it described as a “lackadaisical and indifferent approach”, and put the defaulting Chief Secretaries on notice that they would have to appear personally with affidavits explaining the delay.

What the Court held on Nodal Officers

The 28 April order records that most of the defaulting jurisdictions fell into line in the fortnight between hearings. Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Sikkim, Tripura, Mizoram, Uttarakhand and the Union Territory of Delhi had appointed Nodal Officers in the interim. Counsel for Kerala, Jharkhand, Odisha, Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Puducherry, Chandigarh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands informed the Court that appointments had been made on various dates in April 2026.

Only the Union Territories of Lakshadweep and Ladakh remain non-compliant. The Additional Solicitor General K.M. Nataraj submitted that an Advocate-on-Record had been instructed to take steps in the matter. The bench granted a final deadline of 15 May 2026 for these two Union Territories to appoint their Nodal Officers, and directed the Registry to transmit copies of both the present order and the 15 April order to ensure compliance.

The threat of personal appearance by Chief Secretaries appears to have done what seven months of paper directions could not. The bench did not need to make good on it, but the order does not soften the sharp language used on 15 April either — that record stays.

The clarification on PwBD reservation and unreserved seats

The more substantively significant part of the order addresses a question the Court itself had raised in paragraph 53 of its 12 September 2025 judgment: whether a meritorious candidate with a benchmark disability, who scores above the unreserved cut-off, is entitled to be placed against an unreserved seat rather than against the reserved PwBD quota.

The Union of India had filed a compliance affidavit on 2 January 2026 answering this question, but the document was not brought to the Court's notice at the previous hearing because counsel had been absent. On 28 April, the position was finally placed on record, and the bench accepted it.

The Department of Personnel and Training had previously issued three Office Memoranda — dated 15 January 2018, 17 May 2022 and 27 September 2022 — that govern this question. Read together, they establish a clear principle: a PwBD candidate who is selected on the basis of their own merit, without availing relaxed standards, must be adjusted against unreserved vacancies, not against the PwBD quota. Candidates who do avail relaxed standards are placed against reserved vacancies.

The DoPT instructions also draw a careful line on what counts as a relaxation. The provision of a scribe or compensatory time is treated as a facilitative measure, not a relaxation. Cut-off marks, age limits, number of attempts, and other eligibility criteria, when relaxed, do count as relaxed standards.

The position in law ensures that meritorious candidates belonging to the PwBD category are entitled to be considered against unreserved vacancies on the basis of their own merit, while preserving the efficacy and purpose of reservation.

The reasoning

What the Court is doing here, in doctrinal terms, is recognising that horizontal reservation operates differently from vertical reservation. The 2016 Act, like its 1995 predecessor, provides reservation for persons with benchmark disabilities across categories — meaning a PwBD seat exists in the unreserved category, in OBC, in SC and in ST.

The implication, which the Court endorses through the DoPT instructions, is that a candidate who would have been selected on the unreserved merit list anyway should not be counted against the PwBD reservation. To do otherwise would let an employer satisfy its PwBD obligations by claiming credit for candidates who never needed the quota — defeating the statutory purpose.

The new role for the National Law Universities

The third strand of the order is structurally the most consequential. The status report filed by the petitioner records that, despite repeated directions stretching back to the Court's judgment of 25 April 2017, “a significant number” of States and Union Territories “continue to remain either non-compliant or only partially compliant” with the 2016 Act.

The Court's response is to use the now-functional network of Nodal Officers as the institutional spine for a substantive compliance audit, conducted by the eight National Law Universities. The audit, the order specifies, “shall not be merely formal but must involve a substantive evaluation of compliance with statutory mandates.”

National Law University, Delhi has been singled out for an additional task: mapping the Union government's own compliance with the 2016 Act. The matter is listed for 22 September 2026, when the NLUs will report back.

What this means

For practitioners in disability rights litigation, the order does three useful things. It provides an authoritative judicial endorsement of the “own merit” rule for PwBD candidates. It records, on the Court's own assessment, that nearly eight years after the 2016 Act came into force, comprehensive State-level compliance has not been achieved. And it builds out an institutional architecture — Nodal Officers in States, NLUs as auditors, NLU Delhi as Union-level mapper — that did not previously exist in operative form.

The September 2026 hearing will be the test of whether this architecture produces something more than another round of status reports.