Accessibility laws · India

India: RPwD Act 2016 and GIGW

India's Supreme Court struck down the rule that made accessibility standards binding. On 8 November 2024, in Rajive Raturi v Union of India, it held Rule 15(1) of the RPwD Rules to be beyond what the Act allows. The seventeen documents that rule pointed at were recommendatory guidelines dressed up as mandatory ones. The Court gave the Union three months to write real ones. The government's answer is a draft gazetted on 20 July 2026, and in its current form it would reach any establishment, in India or abroad, that makes a website available to people in India.

RPwD Act: 2016
Government guidelines: GIGW 3.0
WCAG version referenced: 2.1
Active enforcement route: Courts

What the law is

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 came into force on 19 April 2017. Section 42 is the ICT provision, and it asks for three things rather than one. All content available in audio, print, and electronic media has to be in an accessible format. People with disabilities have to be able to reach electronic media through audio description, sign language interpretation, and close captioning. And electronic goods and equipment meant for everyday use have to be available in universal design. Two deadlines came out of the Rules underneath it, and both have expired. Service providers, government and private alike, had two years from the Rules coming into force on 15 June 2017, which put their deadline at 15 June 2019. The Act also carries money. Section 89 sets a fine of up to ten thousand rupees for a first contravention, and between fifty thousand and five lakh rupees, meaning 500,000, for any after that.

The technical content lives in Rule 15, and the framing most guides use for it is wrong. Rule 15(1) opens with the words every establishment shall comply, and its ICT clause pointed at the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites without limiting them to government. That clause also carries something concrete that nobody quotes. Documents placed on websites have to be in ePUB or OCR-based PDF format. The Supreme Court singled that requirement out as the one item in the whole rule that was a real standard rather than a pointer at somebody's guideline. Indian Standard IS 17802, in two parts covering requirements and testing, joined the clause on 10 May 2023. GIGW itself reached version 3.0 in March 2023. The National Informatics Centre built it with the STQC directorate and CERT-In. It conforms to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, adds 17 new success criteria over the previous version, and carries a cybersecurity chapter as well.

Then the Supreme Court took the rule apart. It found that the guidelines Rule 15 pointed at set different standards for the same requirement across documents, and that the rule had turned a statute built for compulsion into self-regulation by delegated legislation. The Court's own image for it stuck. Its words were that a ceiling without a floor is hardly a sturdy structure. The Union was directed to write mandatory rules within three months, in consultation with stakeholders, and to make sure the consequences the Act already carries actually get applied once they exist. The draft that came back was gazetted on 20 July 2026 with a thirty-day consultation window, which closed around 19 August 2026. Whether it has been notified in final form since is something we could not establish, so treat what follows as a draft you should be planning against rather than a rule already binding you.

This applies to you if…

You are an Indian government body at central or state level, held to GIGW 3.0. The programme also runs a Website Quality Certification scheme with a published list of compliant websites, so conformance here is something you can be seen to hold or not hold.
You are any establishment providing services in India, which is broader than most summaries admit. Rule 15(1) says every establishment shall comply, and the ICT clause it carries was never limited to government sites.
You are based outside India and serve Indian users, which is where the draft 2026 rules would land hardest. They would apply to every establishment, whether in India or abroad, that manufactures, designs, develops, exercises decisive technical control over, or makes available the covered items to people in India. Websites, apps, software, hardware-based ICT, and consumer products are all named.
You are regulated by a sector regulator, because this is how the duty actually arrives in practice. A SEBI circular dated 31 July 2025 requires regulated entities to bring their digital platforms into line with the RPwD Act and its rules, pointing at the ICT clause specifically. Audit and remediation of what that finds runs inside six months.

What it technically requires

Make your ICT and electronic content accessible, which is the core duty and it does not stop at a web page. Section 42 reaches audio, print, and electronic media, it names audio description and sign language interpretation and close captioning for electronic media, and it asks for universal design in everyday electronic goods. If you sell a device, this touches the device.
Put documents on your site in ePUB or OCR-based PDF format. That has been a hard requirement in Indian law since 2017, and it is the sort of rule an auditor can check in one download. A scanned PDF with no text layer fails it outright.
Follow GIGW 3.0 if you are a government site, which conforms to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Testing to WCAG 2.2 Level AA covers that and gives you margin, with success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing the one thing 2.2 dropped and 2.1 still asks for. Multiple sources describe GIGW as adding Indian-language and script requirements on top, including bilingual content, Unicode fonts, and a visible language selection link, though we could not confirm those against the manual itself.
Build to IS 17802, because that is where the draft rules point. They name Part 1 from 2021 as the standard and Part 2 from 2022 as the way to test against it, and they name no WCAG or GIGW version at all. Where a sectoral standard conflicts with it, the draft says the higher or more stringent requirement wins.
Prepare to publish an Accessibility Conformance Report, which is the draft's real innovation and unlike anything else on this site. Every establishment would have to furnish a report describing its conformance, and supply it free of charge. Then publish it twice over. Once in a human-readable format such as accessible HTML or accessible PDF, and once in a machine-readable one such as JSON or XML. Reports get retested after a major change and refreshed at least every two years. The deadlines run on turnover. Establishments at ₹500 crore or above, meaning 5 billion rupees, would get twelve months. Smaller establishments would get eighteen. Everyone would have to comply within two years of publication, and government entities would have ninety days to rewrite their procurement policies.

All roads lead to WCAG. Start with Level AA, the legal standard or the full 55-rule library. Unfamiliar term along the way? The A to Z glossary decodes it.

How it is enforced

The complaint route runs through the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, who hears complaints and makes recommendations, so nobody has to start in court. Behind that sits the section 89 fine, which the page never used to mention. Ten thousand rupees for a first contravention, and fifty thousand to five lakh for any that follow.

The courts have not waited for the rules to be fixed. Take Amar Jain v Union of India, decided on 30 April 2025. The Supreme Court held that inclusive digital access to e-governance and welfare systems is part of the fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. The right to life, in other words. It then issued twenty binding directions to make digital identity verification accessible. Reported directions include compliance with WCAG 2.1 and GIGW, alternatives to the blinking-eyes liveness test, and acceptance of thumb impressions as valid authentication for blind users. Others cover information in Braille, easy-to-read, and audio-described formats, and involving people with visual impairments in user testing for new services.

Private operators have been ordered to fix things too. In Akshat Baldwa v Yash Raj Films, the Delhi High Court on 16 January 2023 directed the studio to prepare audio description, closed captioning, and Hindi subtitles for a film before its streaming release. It also had to submit them for re-certification. The litigation kept going into 2024, with the Court noting that accessibility features still were not appearing on streaming platforms and directing the Centre to notify guidelines for them.

The draft rules would add teeth the current regime lacks. Fines under the Act, a ninety-day window to remedy after an order, enhanced fines where the violation continues, and beyond that the suspension or cancellation of a registration, certification, authorisation, or approval. A licence is a different order of risk from a fine. If those rules are notified as drafted, an inaccessible website stops being a compliance line item for an Indian regulated business and becomes a condition of trading.

Key dates

Apr 19, 2017RPwD Act 2016 comes into force
2019Accessibility standards notified for ICT
2023GIGW 3.0 published

What to do about it

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Orientation only, current as of August 2026. Not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. For your specific situation, talk to your own lawyer.