Web Accessibility Law in India: the RPwD Act and IS 17802

What the Law Says Today: RPwD Act 2016, Sections 40 to 46

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (Act 49 of 2016) is India's implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Chapter VIII puts accessibility duties on the state and on establishments, and five sections carry the weight for digital products:

• Section 40, Accessibility. The Central Government shall, in consultation with the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, formulate rules laying down standards of accessibility for the physical environment, transportation, information and communications, including appropriate technologies and systems, and other facilities and services provided to the public. The word is “shall”: the standards are a duty, not an option.
• Section 42, Access to information and communication technology. The appropriate Government must take measures so that content in audio, print and electronic media is in accessible formats, that electronic media is accessible through audio description, sign language interpretation and closed captioning, and that everyday electronic goods are universally designed.
• Sections 44 and 45. New buildings cannot get permission or a completion certificate without meeting the accessibility rules, and existing public buildings had five years from the notification of the rules. These are the physical-world consequences the Court later pointed to as the model for enforcement.
• Section 46, Time limit for accessibility by service providers. Service providers, whether Government or private, shall provide services in accordance with the section 40 rules within two years from the date those rules are notified. The Central Government may extend the period for categories of services.
• Section 89, Punishment for contravention. Any contravention of the Act or of a rule made under it is punishable with a fine of up to ten thousand rupees for a first contravention and, for any subsequent contravention, a fine of not less than fifty thousand rupees and up to five lakh rupees.

“Establishment” is defined widely in section 2: it includes Government establishments and private establishments, and a private establishment means a company, firm, cooperative or other society, association, trust, agency, institution, organisation, union, factory or any other establishment the appropriate Government notifies. There is no small-business carve-out in the Act.

The section 40 rules are rule 15 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017 (G.S.R. 591(E), 15 June 2017). As notified, rule 15(1) said every establishment shall comply with the listed standards, and for ICT clause (c) pointed at the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites as the website standard and required documents on websites to be in ePUB or OCR-based PDF. The section 46 two-year window from that notification ran out in June 2019, a point the Supreme Court made in 2024.

What Changed: the 2023 IS 17802 Mandate and the 2024 Judgment

May 2023: IS 17802 enters rule 15. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Amendment) Rules, 2023 (G.S.R. 359(E), signed 10 May 2023, published 11 May 2023, in force on publication) inserted item (iii) into rule 15(1)(c). Websites, apps, ICT-based public facilities and services, electronic goods and equipment for everyday use, and ICT-based consumer products and accessories “shall comply with” IS 17802 (Part 1): 2021 and IS 17802 (Part 2): 2022, as amended from time to time. From that day India had a named, mandatory ICT standard. What it did not have was a deadline, a reporting duty or an enforcement route for ICT.

8 November 2024: Rajive Raturi v. Union of India. A bench of Chief Justice D. Y. Chandrachud and Justices J. B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra decided a public interest petition filed in 2005 (2024 INSC 858). Relying on a nationwide audit by the court-appointed Centre for Disability Studies at NALSAR University of Law, the Court compared the Act's mandatory scheme in sections 40, 44, 45, 46 and 89 with the content of rule 15. Rule 15(1) uses “shall”, so its clauses are mandatory in form, but most of the documents it points to are ministry guidelines that describe themselves as illustrative, broad or to be achieved over time. The Court held that rule 15 “does not provide for non-negotiable compulsory standards, but only persuasive guidelines”, that a ceiling without a floor is hardly a sturdy structure, and that rule 15(1) is therefore ultra vires the Act (paragraphs 74 and 75).

The directions in paragraphs 76 to 78 shape everything that followed. The Union was directed to delineate mandatory rules under section 40 within three months, by segregating the non-negotiable rules from the expansive guidelines already in rule 15, in consultation with all stakeholders and with NALSAR-CDS involved. Progressive compliance with the existing standards was to continue, but a baseline of non-negotiable rules had to be prescribed. Once those rules exist, the Union, States and Union Territories must implement the consequences in sections 44, 45, 46 and 89, including fines. Among the principles the Court listed for the exercise was mandating the integration of assistive technologies such as screen readers, audio descriptions and accessible digital interfaces across public and private platforms.

The three-month deadline fell in February 2025. The ICT draft arrived twenty months after the judgment, and at a hearing on 29 July 2026 Justices Pardiwala and K. V. Viswanathan asked the Additional Solicitor General to consider the suggestions of experts and litigants before the draft is finalised and published in the Gazette, so that no deficiencies are left behind, and listed the matter for January 2027 with compliance affidavits due. For a broader view of how India sits next to other regimes, see the accessibility laws tracker.

The Draft 2026 Rules: What They Require and When

The Draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Amendment) Rules, 2026 were signed on 16 July 2026 as notification S.O. 3962(E) by the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (Divyangjan) in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, and issued in the Gazette of India Extraordinary, Part II Section 3(ii), on 20 July 2026. Objections and suggestions were invited for thirty days from the date the Gazette was made available to the public. The notification recites the Supreme Court's direction as its reason for being, and its explanatory note describes the aim as “a mandatory accessibility floor” for ICT products and services.

Rather than adding another item, the draft replaces clause (c) of rule 15(1) wholesale with a self-contained code in ten parts: definitions, scope, applicable standards, the Accessibility Conformance Report, non-negotiable standards and timelines, enforcement, quality control orders, grievance redressal, a National Accessibility ICT Committee, and a three-yearly review. The timelines are the part most businesses need first. Every one of them is counted from the date the final rules are published, so none has started.

Turnover is read from the immediately preceding financial year and, for applicability, includes the consolidated turnover of the establishment together with any entity that controls it, is controlled by it or is under common control, where those entities make covered items available to persons in India, including through platforms or intermediaries. The only exemption is archived content, clearly identified as such and not intended for active public use or update.

Schedule I for the web is WCAG 2.1 Level A

Schedule I lists the non-negotiable clauses of IS 17802 (Part 1) for websites, documents and software. Its web column names thirty clauses of clause 9, and they are exactly the thirty WCAG 2.1 Level A success criteria, from 9.1.1.1 Non-text content to 9.4.1.2 Name, role, value. The document column (clause 10) and the two software columns (clause 11, open and closed functionality) list the same criteria as adapted for non-web content. The Level AA criteria, including contrast, reflow, resize text, focus visible and consistent navigation, arrive with the full-compliance duty at two years. The Schedule also says references follow the latest BIS version of the standard, so a future revision of IS 17802 would flow through automatically.

Schedule II covers hardware: clause 6 of IS 17802 (ICT with two-way voice communication), clause 7 (ICT with video communication) and clause 8 (hardware) for the hardware, electronic goods, consumer products and accessories in items (d) to (h) of the scope. Read the full text of the draft in the Gazette PDF; the English text starts on page 11.

Who Is Covered, Including Entities Outside India

Clause (B) applies to every establishment that manufactures, designs, develops, exercises decisive technical control over, or makes available, directly or indirectly, any of the covered items to persons in India for public or consumer use, “whether such establishment is located within India or outside India”, including automated systems that enable user interaction with ICT. The covered items are:

• Websites, mobile applications, tablet applications, other touch-based applications and software, including their documentation and support services
• All digital content and electronic documents, including non-web documents
• ICT-based public facilities and services, including services that embed or integrate an ICT-based user interface
• Hardware with two-way voice communication and hardware with video-based communication
• All other ICT-based hardware and electronic goods intended for everyday use
• ICT-based consumer products and ICT-based accessories for general use by persons with disabilities
• ICT-based products used as part of public facilities and services

Three consequences follow. A foreign SaaS vendor, marketplace or app publisher with Indian users is an establishment for these purposes; the Act's definition of a private establishment already reaches companies, firms, trusts and institutions without reference to where they are incorporated. The ₹500 crore turnover line changes the deadline, not the duty: smaller establishments get eighteen months rather than one year, and everyone meets the full standard at two years. And where a sectoral regulator, for example in banking, securities, insurance or telecoms, has notified its own accessibility requirements, those apply as well, and the higher or more stringent requirement prevails.

If you also sell into Europe, the scope logic will feel familiar: the European Accessibility Act likewise reaches non-EU businesses serving EU consumers, and both regimes resolve to the same technical standard family.

IS 17802, EN 301 549 and WCAG: How the Standards Map

IS 17802 was developed under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's Knowledge and Resource Centre for Accessibility in ICT (KAI) project led by C-DAC, and finalised by BIS sectional committee LITD 35. Part 1 (Requirements) was established on 24 December 2021 and Part 2 (Determination of conformance) on 29 April 2022. The foreword of Part 1 settles the relationship with Europe: it is “the technical adoption of the European Standard EN 301 549 v 3.2.1”, with modifications limited to referencing the RPwD Act and the official languages of India, and “the technical coverage is otherwise identical”. Because EN 301 549 incorporates WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so does IS 17802.

The practical upshot is that an audit against EN 301 549 V3.2.1 is an audit against IS 17802, clause for clause. Our EN 301 549 checklist tracks every requirement of V3.2.1 with WCAG cross-links and Excel export, so it works as an interim IS 17802 checklist until BIS publishes the ACR format the draft asks for. Work done against WCAG 2.2 AA with the WCAG 2.2 checklist covers the WCAG 2.1 clauses, with one caveat: WCAG 2.2 removed 4.1.1 Parsing, but 9.4.1.1 remains a Schedule I clause in India, so keep your markup free of duplicate IDs and broken nesting.

ETSI published EN 301 549 V4.1.1, aligned to WCAG 2.2, on 2 September 2026. The draft rules cite the 2021 edition of IS 17802, and nothing in them moves until BIS revises the Indian standard; when it does, the Schedules say the references follow the latest version.

The Accessibility Conformance Report Duty

The draft's central compliance document is the Accessibility Conformance Report. Clause (D) requires one for every covered item, whether built in-house, procured from a supplier or otherwise made available, within the same timelines as the Schedules. Its requirements read like a specification for the report itself:

• Published, free, in two formats. The ACR goes on the establishment's website or app at no cost, in a human-readable version (accessible HTML or accessible PDF) and a machine-readable version (JSON, XML or another structured format). Publishing only one is non-compliance. If the two disagree, the human-readable version prevails.
• Clause by clause, against Part 2 testing. It states conformance with IS 17802 (Part 1) for each applicable requirement, as tested under the procedures in IS 17802 (Part 2), using a recognised format such as the VPAT or the format BIS is asked to notify within ninety days. Supporting explanations must cite test results and methods; generic or blanket statements of conformance are prohibited, and the report must disclose whether automated testing, manual inspection and assistive-technology testing were performed, with the scope and limitations of each.
• Reviewed before launch, retested on change. The establishment must review and verify every ACR before deployment and fix identified non-conformities before release; relying on a supplier's ACR without that due diligence is no defence. Any major change, meaning one that materially alters functionality, interface, design, usability or accessibility features, triggers re-testing before the change ships, and the revised ACR shows its revision date. Decisions that a change was not major must be recorded and produced on request. Even with no change, a fresh review is due at least every two years.
• Credentialed preparers, senior signature. The ACR must be prepared, reviewed or verified by individuals or organisations with demonstrable expertise in accessibility evaluation, familiarity with the standard and assistive technologies, and relevant training or recognised certifications, whose contact details and credentials are published in the report. It is signed by the nodal officer or by a manager not below Director or designated-partner level, who is responsible for its accuracy. The Grievance Redressal Officer's contact details appear in it too.
• Content is covered at the system level. For content, the ACR obligation attaches to the content management system, publishing workflow or authoring tool rather than to each document, provided the output is accessible. User-generated content platforms report at platform level and must give users the means to add captions, transcripts, alternative text, audio description and structured documents, with guidance at upload time.

If you already produce VPAT-based reports for US federal or European buyers, the shape is familiar; the Indian additions are the machine-readable copy, the mandatory methodology disclosure, the named reviewer credentials and the senior sign-off. Our VPAT and ACR guide explains the template and how to fill it honestly.

Enforcement: Fines, Grievance Officers and Licence Conditions

The fines come from the Act. Section 89 caps a first contravention at ten thousand rupees and a subsequent one at five lakh rupees, amounts that are small next to the EU's member-state penalties. The draft's clause (F) is where the pressure really sits:

• The Chief Commissioner or the State Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities may inquire into non-compliance and impose the section 89 fines; sectoral regulators may add penalties, sanctions or corrective measures under their own statutes where non-compliance continues after a fine.
• A non-compliant establishment must remedy the breach within ninety days of the order and furnish an updated ACR. Missing that attracts enhanced fines; continued non-compliance can lead to suspension or cancellation of a registration, certification, authorisation or approval by the regulator or ministry, on its own motion or on the Commissioner's recommendation.
• Where a covered item needs a licence, registration, certification or approval, the authority must require an ACR or a compliance undertaking as a condition of grant, renewal or continuation. Where no such regime exists, the ACR must be disclosed with the product documentation or on the website or app.
• An ACR that is not furnished, or is false, misleading or materially inaccurate, exposes the establishment to action under whatever law governs it, in addition to the Act.
• Government establishments may not procure, deploy, upgrade or renew non-compliant items at all.

Complaints follow a fixed ladder under clause (H), with the clock at each rung:

Above all of this sits the National Accessibility ICT Committee, which the Department must constitute within ninety days with representatives of ministries, authorities and regulators and at least fifty per cent persons with disabilities. It meets at least quarterly, publishes its proceedings, reviews compliance trends from ACRs and complaints, can issue binding directions to remedy systemic gaps, and will set the certification and empanelment framework for accessibility professionals, auditors and testing agencies. That last function is worth watching: it is where the market for credentialed ACR preparers will be defined.

Government Websites and Apps: GIGW 3.0 and STQC Certification

Government properties have had an operational standard for longer. The Guidelines for Indian Government Websites and Apps, GIGW 3.0, were formulated by the National Informatics Centre with the STQC Directorate of MeitY and CERT-In and released in March 2023, replacing GIGW 2.0 of 2018. The manual states that the guidelines are based on WCAG 2.1 and the RPwD Act, that the current version ensures conformity with Level AA of WCAG 2.1 with seventeen new success criteria over the WCAG 2.0-based previous edition, and that all websites and apps owned by government organisations must comply with them. GIGW 3.0 carries 25 quality, 50 accessibility, 3 cybersecurity and 10 lifecycle-management guidelines, and it is the basis of STQC's Website Quality Certification, which has accepted applications under the 3.0 edition since 1 October 2023.

The two regimes now converge. The original rule 15(1)(c) pointed government websites at GIGW; the 2023 amendment added IS 17802 for everyone; the draft replaces the whole clause with IS 17802 and bars government establishments from procuring anything that does not meet it. In practice a government site that passes GIGW 3.0 is meeting the WCAG 2.1 AA core of IS 17802 clause 9, but it will still need an ACR, a grievance officer and the procurement changes the draft demands. For how other public-sector regimes handle the same convergence, compare the UK's PSBAR monitoring model.

What To Do Now

The draft may change before notification, and the Supreme Court has asked for exactly that. The standard will not change: IS 17802 has been the mandated ICT standard since May 2023, and the Court's direction was to add a floor, not to lower it. Everything below is useful under the current rules and becomes required under the draft.

1. Work out your position. List the websites, apps, documents, software and ICT hardware you make available to people in India, including from abroad. Compute consolidated group turnover against ₹500 crore and note which clock you are on: one year, eighteen months, and two years for full compliance, all from the final notification.
2. Audit against clause 9 now, Level A first. Use the EN 301 549 checklist as your interim IS 17802 checklist and clear the thirty Schedule I clauses before the AA set. A WCAG 2.2 AA audit gives you the clause-level findings an ACR has to cite; the sample audit report shows the format.
3. Start producing the ACR. Build a VPAT-style report against the IS 17802 clauses with per-requirement evidence, a methodology statement covering automated, manual and assistive-technology testing, the reviewer's credentials, and a Director-level signature. Publish it as HTML and as JSON. The VPAT and ACR guide covers the structure.
4. Fix procurement and supplier contracts. Require an ACR from every vendor whose product you deploy, review it before launch and make accessibility a condition of acceptance. Government establishments have ninety days from notification to rewrite tenders and RFPs, so start the templates.
5. Name a Grievance Redressal Officer. Appoint a senior manager, publish their contact details, and run a thirty-day complaint process. Pair it with a public accessibility statement; our accessibility statement guide and statement generator give you a draft.
6. Make the content pipeline accessible. The ACR for content attaches to your CMS, document workflow and authoring tools, so fix templates, PDF export and video publishing once rather than document by document. Platforms with user-generated content need captioning, alt text and audio-description capability within six months.
7. Watch two dates. The final notification in the Gazette, which starts every clock, and the Supreme Court's January 2027 hearing, where the Union must file compliance affidavits. This page will be restamped when either moves.

Sources

Every figure on this page was read from the documents below on 19 October 2026. Law-firm summaries were used only to find the primary texts, not as sources.

1. Draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Amendment) Rules, 2026, notification S.O. 3962(E) dated 16 July 2026, Gazette of India Extraordinary, Part II Section 3(ii), issued 20 July 2026 (eGazette ID CG-DL-E-23072026-274669)
2. Rajive Raturi v. Union of India and Others, 2024 INSC 858, Writ Petition (Civil) 243 of 2005 with 228 of 2006, Supreme Court of India, 8 November 2024
3. Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Amendment) Rules, 2023, G.S.R. 359(E) dated 10 May 2023 (Gazette No. 287, 11 May 2023), with the BIS notifications establishing IS 17802 Parts 1 and 2 annexed
4. Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (Act 49 of 2016), sections 2, 40 to 46 and 89, India Code
5. IS 17802 (Part 1): 2021, Accessibility for the ICT Products and Services, Part 1 Requirements, Bureau of Indian Standards, December 2021 (foreword and contents)
6. EN 301 549 V3.2.1 (2021-03), Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services, ETSI, CEN and CENELEC
7. Guidelines for Indian Government Websites and Apps (GIGW) 3.0, manual, National Informatics Centre, MeitY
8. Transition Plan from GIGW: 2018 to GIGW: 2023, STQC Directorate, MeitY, dated 23 May 2023
9. Supreme Court hearing of 29 July 2026 in the Rajive Raturi proceedings, as reported by Verdictum and PTI (press report, not the order text)