MBBS guidelines for disabled students reduce a person to a limb

It was a peaceful Saturday when the tempest burst forth. The National Medical Commission, following almost nine months of Court-ordered deliberation and quietude, published its interim disability guidelines for admission to MBBS — two days prior to NEET 2025 counselling's commencement on 21 July. I had hardly finished reading the paper before my phone started ringing. Answering was an experienced paediatrician, his tone bristling with ire.

One of his patients — a young student who was partially hemiparetic — had passed the NEET 2025 exam. He had worked diligently than others, living in a world that never yields to someone like him. But now, his fate was to be determined not by his merit but by a checklist. A self-declaration affidavit asked questions like:

"Can you support weight and walk on your affected leg?""Can you go up or down stairs independently?"

The doctor was angered. "What is the relevance of this to being a good physician?" he demanded. He was correct.

On asking the wrong questions

This is a classic textbook case of what occurs when policymakers pose the wrong questions — questions that confuse bodily symmetry with clinical proficiency, and physical conformity with professional ability. Questions that boil a life down to a limb, and a vocation to a staircase.

I know this firsthand — not as an outsider, but as one living it. I, too, have a mobility impairment. I am not able to stand unsupported on one leg. Stairs have never been my ally. And yet, I work in a health care institution. I have taught, practiced, published, and argued in the nation's highest court. These are not accommodations made in spite of my disability — they are the facts I live and provide, each and every day.

Last year, when the Supreme Court was listening to Om Rathod vs The Director General Of Health Services, I had presented a report that the bench subsequently deemed "pivotal." The judgment was a turning point: it rejected deficit-based models of disability, asserted the right to reasonable accommodation, and instructed the NMC to implement a functional and inclusive approach. It requested reform. It requested imagination. It requested justice.

The physicians they didn't want to see

Soon enough, NMC contacted me — unofficially, naturally. Not to implement structural change or inclusive policy, but for a list. A list of physicians with disabilities.

Considering my background in disability rights litigation, they knew that I was part of a network of professionals who had defied every stereotype the system previously held against them. So I answered — not with names, but with stories.

I gave them ten.

A transplant surgeon who ambulates with an orthosis. A wheelchair-bound urologist who performs surgery. A blind psychiatrist whose vision is greater than sight. A neurodivergent physician who reins in the madness of medicine with understated genius.

Ten physicians who did not request to be honored. They requested only to be noticed.

But none — not a single one — was offered a seat on the final committee.

However, back came the same architects of the previous exclusionary guidelines. But there was a new addition — a physician from an Institution of National Importance who had a physical disability. When I spotted his name, I prayed.

But even he signed off on the screening-out criteria: "Can you climb stairs? Can you stand on your affected leg?"

The irony was painful. He couldn’t do those things either. And yet, he had approved their use to exclude others.

I understand why.

In medical college, I, too, once believed that my body was the problem. The curriculum, rooted in the medical model of disability, framed people like me as patients, not peers. My impairment wasn’t a variation — it was a flaw to be fixed.

It took years — and reading the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) — to unlearn this. The social model of disability shifted everything. It didn’t ask what is wrong with you? It asked, what is wrong with the environment that excludes you? That question was radical. And healing.

It's why when senior Supreme Court judge and former Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud made a ruling in the Om Rathod case, he didn't just call for doctors with disabilities on expert panels. He insisted on experts in disability justice.

Because lived experience on its own isn't sufficient. Without critical consciousness, it threatens to mirror the very oppression it aims to flee from. This was also the reason behind the Supreme Court mandating training of all 16 medical boards with disabled doctors.

The guidelines we received

What we were given on 19 July is not reform. It's a specter of things past.

The temporary guidelines still query whether a student can ascend a stair, but not if the college possesses a ramp. They query whether a student can tolerate weight, but not if the system can tolerate the weight of its own bias.

Delayed rights — or coded as gatekeeping mechanisms — are denied rights.

The NMC had an opportunity to do better. It could have asked more pointed questions. It could have invited the right individuals. It could have heard from the doctors who redefined medicine by refusing to be erased.

It didn't. And that silence is louder than any statement.

Ultimately, it is not only disabled students being filtered out, but the potential for a more compassionate, equitable, and compassionate medical education system.

And that is a diagnosis the country can no longer refuse to see. Dr Satendra Singh is a physician and Director-Professor at University College of Medical Sciences & GTB Hospital, New Delhi. He tweets @drsitu. Views are personal.