The principle of reasonable accommodations (RA) is foregrounded in the legal framework through the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016.
The Act describes RAs as those adjustments which ensure that Persons with Disabilities (PwD) are able to exercise their rights equally with others.
These RAs may range from building ramps or providing assistive technologies to restructuring job requirements and modifying workplace policies.
However, public and private institutions are exempt from implementing these RAs if they can prove that such an exercise would cause them disproportionate or “undue burden”
Challenges in implementation
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) charts out an illustrative set of factors which should aid an institution in objectively determining its undue burden.
However, from a financial standpoint, Indian institutions are still reluctant to bear the costs of complying with such anti-discrimination legislation.
When institutions are made the sole cost-bearers of RAs, they adopt efficiency-enhancing, utilitarian approaches rather than a welfare-based approach towards PwDs.
Informed by prejudices that PwDs are inherently less productive, or that providing RAs is always expensive, institutions tend to use the defence of undue burden for reasons of expediency more than for reasons of actual hardship.
This directly compromises the rights of PwDs and makes them the subject of a cost-benefit analysis.
Thus, setting a uniform legal standard to determine undue burden becomes imperative in order to prevent misuse.
However, compliance with this standard can only thrive in an ecosystem where institutions realise that in addition to fulfilling the legal mandate, an investment in RAs can also generate tangible business benefits for them
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