Rajive Raturi v. Union of India
Background
Rajive Raturi, a visually disabled petitioner, filed this public-interest writ petition years earlier seeking court-ordered accessibility measures (audible traffic signals, tactile pavement blocks, accessible buses/trains/airports, accessible government buildings and websites, sign-language interpreters, etc.) for persons with disabilities. By the time of this order, Parliament had enacted the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, which itself imposed statutory deadlines on the Government for many of these very measures through the "Accessible India Campaign" (AIC). The Court had been monitoring compliance through periodic status reports filed by the Union and State Governments.
Decision Breakdown
The Court found that while the Central Government had taken some steps, most State Governments had made little or no progress: for instance, only seven states had even identified government buildings for accessibility retrofitting, well past the original deadline. Holding that the ten action points sought by the petitioner were now statutory obligations under the 2016 Act (a position the Union itself had conceded), the Court went through each action point, accessible government buildings, airports, railway stations, public transport, government websites/documents, building codes, and sign-language interpreter training, and issued a fresh set of concrete, revised deadlines (ranging from February 2018 to December 2019) for compliance, while making clear no further extensions would be granted for some already-missed targets. The matter was not closed outright but kept listed for a further compliance report after three months, consistent with the Court's practice of continuing supervision ("continuing mandamus") in this kind of PIL.
Lesson Learnt
Where a statute (here, the Disabilities Act, 2016) itself fixes a government's accessibility obligations and deadlines, courts will enforce those deadlines directly rather than treat them as aspirational, and will keep a matter under ongoing judicial supervision, with fresh timelines, until genuine compliance is shown.