Summary: The Bombay High Court has upheld the state's power to reassess disability certificates of government employees, but only as a one-time, evidence-based exercise, not a template for open-ended suspicion. This piece traces how Indian courts arrived at that balance and what it means for the people caught in between.

This year, twenty-one schoolteachers in Pune were abruptly sent home. Not for any wrongdoing, but because the state demanded they prove, once again, a disability that had already been officially recognized years ago. Across Maharashtra, over 700 government employees faced the same humiliating ordeal: they were summoned back to medical boards to re-validate disabilities already certified. For some, their disabilities were obvious. For others, the process meant long journeys, endless waiting, and the degrading experience of having their bodies and minds repeatedly questioned as if their disabilities were doubts to be settled, rather than facts to be accepted. This troubling situation brings to light a critical legal question in India: once the state certifies a disability, can it justifiably reopen that decision? The Bombay High Court's recent ruling attempts to balance two harsh realities: that fraud can exist, and that disabled citizens should never be forced to continually prove their identity.

How the trouble began

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, gave India its modern framework for certifying disability and reserving jobs, college seats, and welfare benefits for those who qualify. What it did not do was say whether a certificate, once issued, was final. That silence became a live problem in Maharashtra, where a state-wide audit found something troubling: in some districts, more than 90 per cent of employees claiming benefits for hearing impairment had developed the condition only after they were already in government service, often curiously around the time new disability-linked benefits were introduced. Acting on this pattern, the state ordered primary-school teachers appointed under the disability quota to undergo fresh medical examinations. The results were damning for many: disability levels well below the legal threshold of 40 per cent, and in some cases, no disability at all. The state's instinct, to protect a reservation system that genuine claimants depend on, was reasonable. However, the chosen method treated an entire category of employees as suspects, without first considering whether it was fair to the many honest individuals caught in the same net.

What the courts have said

Indian courts had already begun feeling their way toward an answer before Maharashtra's crisis reached the Bombay High Court. In Ramprakash Kharlwa v. State of Rajasthan earlier this year, the Rajasthan High Court's Jaipur Bench held that no law makes a disability certificate untouchable forever and that the state can order reassessment, even of employees already serving, where a certificate may have been obtained through misrepresentation or issued by someone not authorized to issue it.

However, the Allahabad High Court, in Maaz Ahmad v. Union of India, established clear limits on the extent of that power. A NEET aspirant with a permanent disability certified on the government's own UDID database was made to undergo a fresh medical test by a board that then tried to question his certified disability percentage. Justice Pankaj Bhatia stopped this cold. Such boards, he held, may only test whether a candidate is functionally capable of doing the course. They cannot re-decide a disability percentage that a properly authorized body has already certified. The certificate, he said, must stand.

Not every recent ruling has landed on the side of the certificate-holder, though. In Shubham Agarwal v. Union of India, a candidate who had cleared the 2024 Civil Services Examination under the disability quota, on the strength of a 2016 certificate citing 40 per cent hearing loss, ran into three conflicting government assessments. AIIMS found his condition treatable and not permanent; an Appellate Medical Board at the Army's Research and Referral Hospital then put the figure at nearly 68 per cent. Faced with what the Delhi High Court itself called "a difference of opinion of a high magnitude," the courts allowed a third, conclusive examination. Agarwal did not complete it, and the Supreme Court held that UPSC was under no obligation to appoint him under the disability quota. The case is a reminder that the same courts protecting certificate-holders from harassment have also insisted that a candidate cooperate fully once a genuine, documented conflict between medical boards exists, rather than treating an earlier favorable finding as untouchable.

Underlying all of this is the Supreme Court's 2021 ruling in Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission, which described reasonable accommodation not as a favor the state grants at its discretion but as part of the constitutional guarantee of equality itself. Disability, the Court said, is not a fixed medical label to be checked and rechecked whenever it suits the administration. It is the product of a person's impairment meeting a world that isn't built for them.

The Bombay High Court's balance

Against this backdrop, the Bombay High Court heard the petitions of the Maharashtra teachers and employees swept up in the state's verification drive. In Santosh Hiraman Lashkare v. State of Maharashtra, a division bench of Justices Ravindra V. Ghuge and Abhay J. Mantri chose neither of the easy paths. The Court stressed that the State is not precluded from re-examining the authenticity of a disability certificate merely because it had previously accepted it. It recognized that very employer has an inherent authority to verify the genuineness of documents relied upon for public employment. Appointment obtained on the strength of a forged disability certificate, the Court held, amounts to a fraud on the public and cannot be insulated from scrutiny. But it also refused to let the exercise become an open license for recurring suspicion. The Court approved the Maharashtra drive only as a one-time measure, tied specifically to the irregularities the state had documented, not as a template for the future. Crucially, it quashed the immediate suspensions and salary stoppages that had already been imposed, replacing them with a fairer path: a fresh, uniform examination before a specially constituted medical board, with any punitive action to follow only after that process and only through proper departmental enquiry.

Going forward, the Court held, the state must follow the procedure already written into the RPwD Act and its Rules, not informal government resolutions. It is, in effect, a judgement that trusts the state to act once, on real evidence, while refusing to let that trust become a permanent state of suspicion.

What the human rights body said

The National Human Rights Commission's Core Group on Disabilities, meeting in Delhi in January 2026 under Justice V. Ramasubramanian, took a similar view before the Bombay High Court ruled. Its sense was that any fresh verification policy should look forward, applying to new applicants, rather than reopening the files of people who had been receiving their benefits for years without incident. Scrutiny, it suggested, should follow specific, evidence-based suspicion, not a dragnet cast over every certificate-holder in the state.

What are these costs, in ordinary terms?

None of this is theoretical for the people living through it. A medical board convened on a fixed date in a distant town is a serious obstacle for someone whose disability makes travel difficult in the first place. For a person with an intellectual disability, an unfamiliar hospital and an unfamiliar test, on a clock not of their choosing, can be frightening in ways a healthy bureaucrat might not anticipate. Commentary in the press has pointed out how these drives, however well-intentioned, can turn disabled citizens into objects of official doubt rather than people the Constitution has already promised to protect. The twenty-one teachers suspended in Pune are the clearest illustrations. Their salaries stopped not because fraud had been proven against them individually, but because the state decided, as a matter of policy, to look again at what it had already accepted.

Where the law now stands

These decisions collectively establish that the law does not serve as a blank cheque for the state nor an absolute shield for every holder of a disability certificate. Reassessment is legally permissible. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules 2017 distinguish between permanent and time-bound certificates, making it clear that the possibility of revisiting a certificate was never entirely excluded. However, that power is subject to important constraints. It cannot be exercised to second-guess about a disability assessment already certified by a duly authorized UDID medical authority. Any reassessment must be conducted by the competent medical boards designated under the statutory framework, not through informal administrative directions. Nor can it be deployed as a blanket, retrospective exercise to re-examine every existing certificate. Judicial precedent suggests that only a one-time reassessment based on specific, documented grounds giving rise to a genuine suspicion of fraud or error is likely to withstand legal scrutiny.

Ultimately, the Bombay High Court's decision is less a definitive resolution of the issue than a careful delineation of constitutional and statutory limits. It recognizes that the State may revisit a disability certificate where there is a credible and specific cause to do so. What it cannot do is treat every disability certificate as perpetually provisional, reopening it whenever administrative convenience, rather than evidence, dictates. For persons with disabilities whose employment and livelihood depend upon the certainty of these certifications, this distinction is far from legal technicality. It marks the difference between a system founded on trust in lawful certification and one that presumes suspicion without justification.

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