India’s National Building Code (NBC) is one of the country’s finest documents. The creative collaboration of architects, designers, engineers, policymakers and, notably, disabled people, the code is based on the principles of universal design. As the ‘Constitution’ for the Indian construction industry, the NBC is mandatory for all buildings in the country. Compliance is required to obtain building permits and legal approval.
However, at a recent seminar on the NBC in Noida, participants were surprised because despite being held at a training centre constructed by the Bureau of Indian Standards, the building did not conform to the directives of the NBC. No accessible washrooms, no designated spots for wheelchairs in the seminar room, no universal signage. Instead, in direct violation of the code, it had slippery flooring, poor lighting, badly designed ramps, and seats that flipped closed before you were seated.
The irony was staggering. After writing the book on non-negotiable standards for buildings in India, the organisation had ignored most of them.
A little history lesson
In the United States, wounded veterans returning from World War II in the late 1940s refused to accept their new status as disabled people and sit quietly on the sidelines. They began to make demands for education, training, and access. It started with a request for the smallest of things: a cut in the curb of a city sidewalk (those mini ramps you see in many cities) so they could get their wheelchairs on to the walkway.
City planners routinely denied such requests, saying they never saw disabled people on the streets. The first documented instance of an official curb cut was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1945. But one curb ramp couldn’t spark the kind of sweeping change that the issue required.
It wasn’t until 30 years later that activists, by then fed up with pleading, took matters into their own hands. Disabled individuals in Berkeley, California, took sledgehammers and broke down curbs, poured their own cement, and created makeshift curb ramps.
The time was finally right. Everywhere in the country old systems were being questioned as decades-long movements for free speech, non-violence, civil rights, and women’s emancipation gathered strength. The simple logic of accessibility took hold and curb cuts became a standard feature of urban planning throughout the United States.
Everyone else—be it parents pushing prams, commuters with wheeled bags, kids on tricycles, or people hauling heavy equipment—soon realised how much easier their own lives had become. Removing an unnecessary obstruction is simply good design.
While municipal authorities around the world have had their own local building norms for centuries, by the 1970s, most countries, including India, had formulated comprehensive national building codes, which reflected new materials, population growth, and an increasing emphasis on safety. Although access was a part of the national code, it was an annexure, offering vague guidance rather than law. Local codes existed side by side, providing loopholes for those wanting to avoid even suggestions of equity.
Starting in 2010, disabled activists, legal experts, and access consultants in India began a concerted campaign to harmonise existing guidelines in one document. Disabled advocates Shivani Gupta and Anjlee Agarwal, Supreme Court lawyer Subhash Chandra Vashishth, and architect Gaurav Raheja worked tirelessly to produce the 2016 NBC, containing detailed accessibility provisions that are now the law in every state and union territory. An even more comprehensive code is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.
Design that works for everyone
The code, when followed, makes life better for all of us. Design that works for everyone will work for you too—not only right now, when you may be fit, active, and able to do everything for yourself, but also when you are old. It will work when there is an emergency and you have to evacuate your building safely and fast, and when your arms are full and you need to open a door with your elbow. Good design is when you’re moving furniture and the doorway is wide enough to accommodate it, and when you don’t slip and fall because your kitchen floor is tiled with non-skid materials.
Latika, the organisation for disabled children and adults that I work with in Dehradun, is building a campus many believe will be the first in India to follow universal design principles. We have embraced the NBC as a welcome, trustworthy guide to creating spaces that work for every single person. In doing so, we’ve had new insights.
For example, in adhering scrupulously to the NBC on worker safety—2,16,088 accident-free work hours so far—we have realised we can do more to protect the families we work with: Why not enforce helmet wearing as a requirement for children and parents who come to our centres on motorbikes?
The code also recognises the specific needs of women on the site, which led us to consider our women staff as well as the mothers who bring their children for our services. Our family resource centre will include a nursing pod for anyone breastfeeding a baby. We’re also providing a room of requirement. At first, this was meant for women with period pain to take a nap. Now we see that anyone might need a nap or a quiet moment to reflect. It will also be a staging site for young adults aspiring for hotel jobs to learn how to make a bed, fold towels, vacuum, dust, and polish.
Our ramp, built to the code’s requirement of a 1:20 slope, is necessarily both enormous and expensive. Unable and unwilling to compromise on its dimensions, we can now think creatively about how to make the most of it. Two ideas have emerged so far:
- The shape of the ramp has created a vast open space we’re designing as a village piazza—an atrium for performances, musical events, poetry readings, traditional crafts, and games.
- The gentle slope of the protected-from-the-elements ramp makes it an ideal and safe place for our elderly neighbours to take their daily walks. Our Strolling Seniors Club will open early in the morning before the children arrive, and again after we close in the evening.
The Latika building has 32 bathrooms featuring Indian, Western, wheelchair-accessible, gender-specific, and gender-neutral toilets; for small children afraid of falling in, there are tiny, child-size toilets. Taps, sink heights, and toilet clearances are as prescribed in the code. It has been challenging to address the many needs we want to cater to given what is available in the market. While suppliers of sanitary fittings have a disability line, these are double the cost and still not universally accessible.
One of my daughters used a wheelchair her whole life, the other one is eight months pregnant, and I, at 66, am developing arthritis in my hands. Although our conditions are different, we all need to reach the tap to wash our hands. Lever taps are one simple answer—people with limited or no use of their hands can turn them on either with their elbow or chin. Providing a longer handle than usual makes it even easier (this costs only an additional INR 200), as does lowering sinks.
The code also talks about the concept of ‘visitability’—it should be possible for physically disabled people to visit any friend’s home. This requires all public residential buildings to have a specified, clear door width at the building’s main entrance and, in each unit, wheelchair access into the rooms, the kitchen, and one toilet.
Visitability made us think about adults who use diapers and how limited their lives are due to the lack of places where they can be changed with dignity and comfort. We’ve built two large changing place (CP) toilets, each equipped with a bed that can be adjusted hydraulically to safely lower the adult on to it and then raised so the caregiver’s back is spared. To those wondering how many actually require such facilities, there were three in my own family, and their travel was severely restricted by the lack of them. With CP toilets, India’s travelling demographic will be transformed.
That is the beauty of India’s NBC. Follow it to the letter, in the spirit in which it is written, and India itself will be transformed. Embedded in the NBC are references to laws on child protection, workers’ rights, fire safety, environmental protection, and waste management—each one supports and inspires new approaches to nation building.
And no, it’s not more expensive. It’s the cost of building. Pay now for a safe building, or pay later when the building collapses because the code was ignored. Latika’s campus is being constructed in the spirit of the NBC. It has not only supported us to achieve our vision, but has also given us the courage to experiment with innovative ways of bringing it to life.
This article was written with support from Max India Foundation as part of an ongoing initiative to promote accessibility in the built world.
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