Every morning, millions of Indian women step out to work, study or run errands, often after weighing the safety of the route in their heads. For women with disabilities, that daily calculation gets far more complicated. A missing ramp, a pothole-ridden street, an inaccessible toilet, or a bus that will not stop long enough can decide whether she leaves the house at all. Physical access is not just a convenience issue here. It decides who gets to participate in the world outside their front door.
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The double burden of gender and disability
Women in India already navigate a public environment shaped around male mobility patterns and timings. Poor street lighting, unsafe public transport, and a general lack of women-friendly infrastructure make movement harder even for non-disabled women. Layer a physical disability on top of this, and the barriers multiply.
Roads without footpaths, broken pavements, absent curb cuts, and the total absence of tactile or audio signals leave locomotor and visually impaired women dependent on someone else just to cross a street. The Accessible India Campaign itself acknowledges that persons with disabilities have an equal right to travel and use infrastructure with dignity, yet on-ground implementation of design codes like the Indian Roads Congress guidelines for pedestrian facilities remains patchy in most cities. For a woman with a disability, this is not an occasional inconvenience. It is a daily negotiation that decides whether she can go to college, hold down a job, or simply visit a relative.
Public transport built without her in mind
Buses and trains in most Indian cities were designed decades before accessibility became part of urban planning conversations. High footboards, short halting times, absence of ramps, and the sheer crush of commuters make boarding a bus a genuine physical challenge for a woman using a wheelchair, crutches, or a cane.
Government policy has acknowledged the gap. The revised National Urban Transport Policy of 2014 formally included universal accessibility as a planning requirement, but a decade later, most transit systems still fall short of that standard, as official documentation itself lays out. Cost adds another layer of exclusion. Consultations held under the Indo-German development cooperation on inclusive mobility found that even where accessible transport exists, high fares push lower-income persons with disabilities, a group in which women are disproportionately represented, away from using it at all, as noted in a GIZ report on inclusive mobility in Indian cities.
The added weight of safety
Beyond physical design, safety concerns compound the problem. A woman with a disability who cannot move quickly or independently is more vulnerable at poorly lit stops, empty platforms, or during longer waiting times for accessible vehicles. This makes many women avoid travelling after dark entirely, shrinking the hours in which they can work, study, or socialise.
The toilet crisis nobody talks about
Among all the barriers women with disabilities face outside the home, the lack of usable toilets is one of the most under-discussed, and one of the most damaging to health. Most public toilets in India, including those in bus stands and railway stations, are of the ground-level Indian-style design. For locomotor disabled women who move around by crawling or with support, these toilets are close to unusable.
An analysis of public toilet usage patterns in India found that a large share of surveyed public toilets in Delhi had no separate section for women at all, nearly half had no functioning lock, and over half had no running water. When toilets are unsafe, filthy, or simply absent, the effects on women with disabilities are amplified because they often cannot easily seek out an alternative or leave quickly if something feels unsafe.
The scale of the government’s implementation gap is stark. An RTI query filed under the Swachh Bharat Mission’s accessibility mandate revealed that 19 out of India’s 35 states and union territories did not have a single accessible public or community toilet years after the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act made such access a legal requirement.
What this does to the body
Faced with these conditions, many women with disabilities simply stop drinking water or eating while outside the house for long stretches, just to avoid needing a toilet they cannot access. This is not a minor lifestyle adjustment. Repeated dehydration and delayed urination are known to cause urinary tract infections and kidney stones, health problems that could largely be avoided with basic accessible sanitation. A woman planning a train journey or a day out effectively has to plan her hydration around the absence of a toilet, something most people never have to think about.
Confined within four walls
When the outside world presents this many obstacles, many families respond by simply not letting their disabled daughters go out. This is rarely framed as restriction by the family itself. It is usually explained as protection, from bad roads, from harassment, from the exhaustion of navigating an inaccessible city. But the outcome is the same: many girls with disabilities grow up almost entirely indoors.
According to Census data cited by Women Enabled International, women make up nearly 44 percent of India’s disabled population, and a significant proportion of girls with disabilities never attend school or take part in any activity outside the home. A Human Rights Watch investigation similarly documented that women and girls with disabilities in India often grow up confined to their homes, excluded from schooling, marriage, employment, and social life altogether, with families citing safety and stigma as the reason.
The psychological cost
Confinement is rarely just physical. Girls who spend their formative years without friends, classmates, or any independent experience of the outside world often describe deep loneliness. In interviews compiled by the American India Foundation, young disabled women describe themselves as among the most isolated people they know, spending most of their time alone because social interaction outside the family is so hard to come by. India’s own Supreme Court has observed that women with disabilities, navigating a world designed for the able-bodied, are frequently treated as easy targets rather than equal citizens, a reality documented in the same account.
This isolation feeds into feelings of worthlessness and depression that have little to do with the disability itself and everything to do with denied opportunity. A girl who never leaves her house does not get to discover what she is capable of, academically, socially, or professionally. The disability becomes secondary to the exclusion built around it.
Why this is a rights issue, not just an infrastructure one
It is tempting to treat all of this as a series of engineering problems, more ramps here, better toilets there. But the deeper issue is that inaccessible physical environments quietly deny women with disabilities their right to participate in public life on equal terms. India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 legally recognises accessibility as a right, not a favour. Yet as the toilet audits and transport reports above show, the gap between law and lived reality remains wide.
Closing that gap requires more than budget allocations. It requires urban planners, transport authorities, and architects to design with disabled women specifically in mind, not as an afterthought bolted onto existing structures. It also requires families and communities to stop treating confinement as the safer option and instead push for the access that would make going outside genuinely safe.
What do you think? If accessible toilets and safer streets became the norm rather than the exception, how much of the confinement described here do you think would disappear on its own? And whose responsibility should it be, government, urban planners, or society at large, to close this gap first?
References
- http://accessibleindia.gov.in/content/makeaccessible/transport-systems.php
- https://www.giz.de/en/downloads/giz2023-en-inclusive-mobility-for-indian-cities.pdf
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10622457/
- https://newzhook.com/story/disabled-friendly-toilets-accessibility-accessible-india-campaign/
- https://womenenabled.org/rights-of-women-and-girls-with-disabilities-kenya-india/
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/12/03/india-women-disabilities-locked-away-and-abused
- https://aif.org/voices-unheard-amplifying-the-experiences-of-women-with-disabilities-in-india/
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