For decades, Indian disability jurisprudence has been tethered to a medical model of disability, a paradigm that treats impairment as a clinical defect to be quantified rather than a social identity to be accommodated.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the State’s persistent reliance on ‘numerical reductionism’, through the practice of setting arbitrary upper ceilings on disability percentages to disqualify candidates from public employment and higher education.
As the legal landscape shifts towards the social model under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, the continued use of these ceilings is not merely an administrative relic, but a manifest violation of the constitutional guarantee of substantive equality.
On March 11, 2026, a Supreme Court Bench comprising Justices Sandeep Mehta and Vikram Nath delivered a profound reality check to the Indian administrative state. In Prabhu Kumar v. State of Himachal Pradesh, the Court overturned the High Court verdict that had validated the unjust exclusion of a highly qualified candidate with a 90% permanent locomotive disability from the post of Assistant District Attorney (ADA). The candidate, an active advocate since 2015, had successfully cleared the competitive selection process and topped the merit list under the reserved category, only to be denied an appointment because the executive recruitment advertisement arbitrarily capped eligibility between 40% and 60% disability.
To make public employment genuinely accessible, India must dismantle these artificial percentage ceilings and align its infrastructure with modern standards of functional competence. This ruling exposes a profound systemic crisis: the intersection of rigid medical gatekeeping and a defensive bureaucracy that treats inclusion as an administrative chore rather than a constitutional mandate.
Indian disability law rests on a structural floor set by Section 2(r) of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which designates 40% impairment as the minimum threshold for qualifying as a person with a benchmark disability. However, the executive department frequently distorts this statutory floor into an exclusionary ceiling. By surreptitiously introducing upper caps, such as the 60% limit challenged in this case, the State creates a narrowly defined, highly discriminatory Goldilocks zone of inclusion.
As per the prevailing administrative logic, a citizen must be disabled enough to qualify for a quota, but able enough to remain convenient for the bureaucracy.
When the State argues that an individual is too disabled to work, it effectively shifts the blame for its own failure to provide reasonable accommodation onto the candidate. As the Court sharply noted, had the appellant qualified under the general category, the State could never have legally denied him the post on account of his physical condition. This practice is the administrative equivalent of a glass ramp, offering the illusion of structural access while ensuring that those with significant progressive or profound disabilities remain permanently locked out, a manifest violation of Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution of India.
The persistence of the present ceiling stems from an epistemic category mistake: outsourcing legal assessments of capability entirely to clinical medical boards.
The biological fraction cannot measure professional acumen. The Supreme Court highlighted that the responsibilities of an ADA - including conducting state litigation, advising departments and teaching law - inherently demand mental alacrity, legal acumen and analytical ability. In this professional landscape, locomotor impairment in an arm can never be interpreted as a functional impediment.
A medical board certificate is a static, clinical calculation. For individuals with genetic conditions, rare diseases, or impairments such as multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, or autoimmune disorders, a single diagnostic percentage cannot capture daily fluctuations in capacity, let alone personal resilience.
By evaluating candidates in an unaccommodated state, the bureaucracy engages in indirect discrimination. They apply seemingly neutral numerical rules that disproportionately penalise individuals whose biological impairments are deemed “severe”, ignoring how modern assistive technology completely neutralises traditional barriers.
For several years, to shield their discriminatory caps, state departments cited V Surendra Mohan v. State of Tamil Nadu, a legacy case that had permitted visual and hearing impairment caps for judicial officers. However, as the Supreme Court observed in Prabhu Kumar, the foundation of V Surendra Mohan was explicitly dismantled by a three-judge bench in Vikas Kumar v. UPSC (2021).
The Supreme Court in Vikas Kumar highlighted that any selection criteria that ignore the doctrine of reasonable accommodation stand on a legally vulnerable footing and cannot serve as binding precedent. Reasonable accommodation is a positive constitutional obligation under Articles 14 and 16, not a matter of charity. It requires the State to adjust the workplace environment rather than disqualifying qualified individuals. The State bears a positive obligation to facilitate the inclusion of PwDs. Efficiency is not a static baseline to be met by the individual; it is a collaborative result of the individual's talent and the State’s provision of assistive technology and infrastructure. To disqualify a candidate based on an upper ceiling is to treat the State’s own failure to provide accommodation as a disqualification for the citizen.
The crisis of numerical reductionism extends far beyond the legal sector. The judgment anchored its reasoning in a broader line of progressive precedents, including Om Rathod v. Director of Health Sciences, Anmol v. UOI, and Kabir Pahariya v. the National Medical Commission (2025). In Kabir Pahariya, despite severe multi-limb deficiencies, the candidate demonstrated clear medical competency by successfully performing intricate surgical simulation techniques under direct observation. Across both decisions, the Supreme Court issued an unequivocal mandate for regulatory authorities to dismantle the administrative framework built on unscientific, stereotypical assumptions and to implement a mandatory regime of individualised, evidence-based functional assessments.
To translate the judicial standard articulated in Prabhu Kumar into a permanent administrative reality, India must move beyond its percentage-based classification regime and adopt a rights-based, multidisciplinary framework.
Mandatory functional capacity evaluation (FCE): Recruitment agencies must employ FCE instead of relying on a static medical certificate to assess job ability. These standardised, practical assessments, conducted by multidisciplinary panels including vocational experts and occupational therapists, are designed to evaluate what a candidate can achieve rather than what they lack.
Adopting the WHO ICF Framework: India must move beyond simple clinical percentages and adopt the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO ICF). The ICF shifts the focus from structural “body defects” to a dynamic matrix that evaluates ‘activities’ and ‘participation’ within a given social and occupational context.
The accommodation-first assessment model: The State must adopt an ‘accommodation-first’ protocol. Competency testing must never occur in a structural vacuum. The essential duties of a post must be mapped against available assistive technologies and the candidate’s professional capabilities must be evaluated while they are utilising those accommodations.
The legal industry must lead the transition from medical gatekeeping to functional competency. We need to dismantle the 'glass ramp', which creates an illusion of access while the "most disabled" remain on the periphery.
In Prabhu Kumar, the Supreme Court imposed exemplary costs of ₹5 lakh on the state government for its unjust denial of employment and for forcing a meritorious citizen into prolonged litigation. Such impositions must be taken as a stern warning to all the public establishments in our country.
India, while continuing its journey towards realisation of the transformative vision of the RPwD Act, 2016, must reckon with an uncomfortable but necessary truth that while physical impairments can be quantified, human capabilities, dignity and intellect cannot be reduced to numbers. Yet, the State persists in relying on rigid, percentage-based thresholds. The questions we ought to be asking are no longer how many ramps have been installed, but how many invisible, institutional barriers and archaic mental barriers still remain intact.
Heading into 2026, the challenge is no longer about legislative intent but about administrative mindset. The social model of disability cannot remain confined to academic conversations or policy documents; it must find expression in the lived realities of government offices, particularly in recruitment processes. The much-relied-upon ‘percentage ceiling’ reveals itself more as a convenient fiction than a legal necessity, one that constrains rather than enables. The law needs to shift its focus if it is to remain loyal to its constitutional promise. The focus must move away from quantifying bodies to recognising potential, from counting impairments to creating genuinely inclusive spaces. Until then, the promise of inclusion risks remaining aspirational rather than actual.
Surbhi Meshram is a Assistant Professor of Law and PhD Scholar at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.