While there are many reasons why AI has become indispensable in today’s society, most notably productivity and efficiency, one critical dimension is often overlooked: its potential to build a more inclusive world. At its core, AI reflects the data it is trained on. What we choose to include, or exclude, ultimately determines who benefits from technological progress.
Yet, despite rapid innovation, deep structural gaps remain in the distribution of opportunity. One of the most persistently overlooked groups in this race is people with disabilities. In India, less than 1% of the corporate workforce comprises persons with disabilities, according to HR and DEI consulting firm Marching Sheep’s PwD Inclusion Index 2025, the Economic Times reported. This is a stark indicator of systemic exclusion rather than lack of talent.
The picture becomes even more troubling on closer examination. Nearly 38% of companies report having no employees with disabilities. Progress, where it exists, is slow. There has been only a 4.1% increase over the past year in organisations that have employed even a single disabled person. These numbers point not to isolated failures, but to a broader absence of enabling ecosystems.
At the heart of this problem lies a critical gap: the lack of inclusive technology capable of supporting the education, employability, and growth of people with disabilities, both within corporate environments and in public systems. Without tools designed for accessibility from the ground up, inclusion remains aspirational rather than actionable.
This exclusion is also reflected in workforce participation rates. Only about 36% of people with disabilities participate in the workforce, compared to nearly 60% of those without disabilities, a disparity that continues to define today’s labour landscape.
Additionally, national surveys show that among individuals with disabilities aged 15 and older, the labour force participation rate is around 23.8%, and the worker population ratio is about 22.8%.
Most employed individuals with disabilities work in the informal sector, often in roles like agriculture, home-based work, or casual labour. There is a notable gender gap: 47% of men with disabilities are employed, compared to just 23% of women, highlighting the compounded disadvantages of gender and disability.
From Charity to Equity
Against this backdrop, a growing number of innovators are challenging a long-held assumption: that disability inclusion is primarily a matter of charity. Instead, they argue that inclusive AI, when designed with lived experience at its centre, can become a structural equaliser, embedding access into systems rather than retrofitting it as an afterthought.
“For a long time, people with disabilities have been invisible in our cities, our schools, our offices,” Prateek Madhav, founder and CEO of AssisTech Foundation (ATF), India’s leading assistive technology (AT) innovation ecosystem, told AIM. “The question is not whether talent exists. It’s whether the system was ever built for them,” he said.
Madhav’s own journey into the disability ecosystem began long before ATF. After two decades in the corporate world, including years at Accenture in the US, he returned to India and began volunteering with disability-focused organisations. What struck him was not a lack of aspiration among people with disabilities, but their absence from public life. “We don’t see them in schools, malls, or workplaces,” he said. “That invisibility is systemic.”
ATF was born of a conviction that technology could serve as a force multiplier if built differently. “Technology doesn’t discriminate,” Madhav noted. “One application can reach millions. The same leverage that powers consumer apps can power independence and dignity.”
Lived Experience as a Design Imperative
That philosophy has shaped a new generation of assistive-technology startups that do not frame disability as a deficit, but as a design constraint worth solving for, often with benefits that extend far beyond the original user group.
For Akshita Sachdeva, co-founder and director of Trestle Labs, an assistive technology firm making education and employment digital and inclusive, that shift began with a single question asked by a young blind student. As a college student, Sachdeva had built a prototype glove that could read and describe objects for visually impaired users. When she tested it at a school in Delhi, a boy excitedly told his father he had read a newspaper independently for the first time. He asked her, “Didi, when can I get this?”
“That question stayed with me,” Sachdeva recalled. “It wasn’t about a prototype anymore. It was about access.”
Trestle co-founder Bonny Dave arrived at the same conclusion from a different starting point. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he gained early exposure to blind schools during college, which challenged his assumptions about access and privilege.
What began as a technical prototype soon evolved into a deeper realisation: meaningful innovation was not about scaling what engineers found interesting, but about identifying the right problem worth solving.
“We had to unlearn our own biases,” Dave explained, describing months spent meeting visually impaired users across cities before committing to a solution that prioritised access to content over novelty.
Trestle Labs’ approach would soon challenge a common assumption in assistive tech, that products must be niche, subsidised, and perpetually dependent on grants. Instead of selling directly to individuals, the company worked with schools, universities, and public institutions, embedding accessibility into shared infrastructure.
Designing for the Margins, Benefiting the Mainstream
“We never branded it as a ‘disability product,’” Sachdeva explained. “If it helps someone with a visual impairment, but also helps a student who doesn’t speak English fluently, that’s real inclusion.”
At Translead Medtech, the focus is not on software but on physical independence, specifically, the everyday act of sitting down and standing up safely. What began as a decade-long research project at IISc evolved into a mechanically engineered chair that requires no electricity, motors, or sensors.
“We were looking at something as basic as sit-to-stand,” Sanchit Jhunjhunwala, Translead’s co-founder, told AIM. The simple act becomes a challenge with age or disability, he said.
Translead’s innovation lies in compliant mechanisms, structures that derive function from geometry rather than electronics. While the product was initially designed for older adults and people with mobility impairments, it is now being trialled in hospitals and rehabilitation settings, extending its relevance far beyond its original use case.
“What we’re seeing is that accessibility-driven design often solves a broader problem,” Jhunjhunwala added. “It’s not charity. It’s engineering.”
Sustainability Beyond Grants and Sympathy
This shift, from charity to equity, is perhaps most visible in how founders talk about sustainability. Many reject the idea that assistive technology must be loss-making or perpetually subsidised.
“We didn’t want to be seen as a not-for-profit people feel sorry for,” Sachdeva emphasised. “We wanted to be transactional, because value was being created.”
Dave reinforced this position: “Assistive technology is often seen as charity first and business later, if at all. That framing limits scale.” From the outset, Trestle Labs chose to operate as a for-profit company, not to dilute its mission, but to strengthen it. “If a product creates value, people should be willing to pay for it, just like they do for any other technology,” Dave argued.
This approach, he believes, is what allows accessibility-first solutions to move into mainstream institutions rather than remain dependent on grants or goodwill. “Inclusion cannot survive on sympathy alone. It has to be engineered for scale.”
The same principle applies in AI-driven solutions for deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. Jayasudan Munsamy, founder and CEO of DeepVisionTech.AI, traces his motivation to personal experience.
“There was this assumption that captions solve everything,” he said. “That may be true in countries where sign language is taught formally. In India, it’s not.”
What followed was a deeper realisation: communication was only the surface problem. Education gaps, digital inaccessibility, workplace isolation, and lack of interpretation services all compounded exclusion.
DeepVisionTech’s work on sign-language interpretation tools emerged from this broader understanding, but Munsamy is careful not to overstate the role of technology. “AI is only useful if it works on the devices people actually have, in the environments they live in,” he noted.
Across these stories, a common thread emerges, which is that lived experience is not an optional input; it is the foundation of design. Whether it is a blind student struggling to access textbooks, a deaf employee unable to communicate at work, or an older adult fearful of falling, these realities shape the technology itself.
Pilot Projects to Policy and Public Infrastructure
For inclusive AI to translate into real equity, it must move beyond pilots and proofs of concept into policy-backed adoption and public infrastructure. In India, this transition is critical.
Slowly, but surely, India has strengthened its policy framework to uplift persons with disabilities, shifting from welfare-based approaches to a rights-based model of inclusion. The cornerstone of this effort is the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016, which recognises 21 categories of disability and mandates non-discrimination, accessibility, and reasonable accommodation in education and employment.
The Act provides 4% reservation in government jobs, alongside obligations for inclusive infrastructure and digital access. Supporting its implementation is the Scheme for Implementation of the RPwD Act (SIPDA), which funds accessibility projects, skill development, and awareness programmes across states.
Complementing this is the ADIP scheme, which subsidises assistive devices to enhance functional independence. Other laws, such as the National Trust Act, and initiatives promoting Indian Sign Language and accessible digital services, address specific needs across disability groups.
This is where ecosystem builders such as AssisTech Foundation (ATF) intervene. “Innovation is meaningless if it doesn’t reach people,” said Madhav. Since its inception, ATF has supported over 65 startups across seven cohorts, helped develop 120+ assistive products, and worked with governments, CSR bodies, and various institutions.
For founders, policy engagement changes the conversation. Instead of being asked whether a solution can be subsidised, they are asked whether it can scale, integrate, and sustain.
When inclusive AI becomes part of procurement policies, education systems, and public infrastructure, it reshapes funding flows, accountability, and expectations. Accessibility stops being optional and begins to function as what it always should have been: essential infrastructure for a more equitable society.
The Future of AI Is Intentional
As AI continues to shape the future of work, education, and public life, we have to make sure that innovation is intentional. The data we choose, the users we centre, and the problems we deem worth solving will determine whether AI deepens existing divides or helps dismantle them.The startups and ecosystem builders working at this intersection offer a compelling alternative narrative: one where disability is not an exception to be accommodated, but a lens through which better systems are built. In doing so, they move the conversation beyond charity, towards equity, agency, and sustainable change.
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