Understanding Intersectional Schooling: How NEP 2020 has Impacted Disabled Students

Abstract

India\'s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) represents one of the most ambitious overhauls of the country\'s educational architecture in three decades. While it articulates a vision of inclusive, equitable, and holistic education, its implications for students with disabilities — especially those navigating multiple axes of marginalisation such as caste, gender, rurality, and poverty — remain deeply underexamined. This article undertakes a critical, intersectional analysis of NEP 2020\'s framework for disability inclusion, tracing the policy\'s conceptual underpinnings, its relationship with constitutional and legislative commitments, and its translation into school-level realities. Drawing on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and empirical studies of classroom practice, the article reveals a persistent gap between the policy\'s aspirational language and structural preparedness. Particular attention is given to intellectual disability, neurodiversity, vocational training, teacher readiness, and rural resource constraints. The article concludes with targeted policy recommendations aimed at transforming NEP 2020\'s promise of inclusion into practice.

Introduction

The text examines inclusive education for students with disabilities in India through the lens of intersectionality, focusing on how multiple social factors (disability, caste, gender, class, and geography) combine to shape unequal educational experiences. It argues that disability cannot be understood in isolation, as students often face overlapping disadvantages that create unique forms of marginalization.

It introduces the social model of disability, which defines disability not as an individual impairment but as barriers created by society and institutions. Using this framework, the study evaluates NEP 2020 (National Education Policy) and its attempt to promote inclusive education. While NEP 2020 supports ideas like universal design for learning, individualized support, and neurodiversity inclusion, it lacks clear implementation strategies, funding clarity, and accountability mechanisms.

The text also outlines India’s legal and policy framework, including the UNCRPD, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (2016), and the Right to Education Act (2009). These laws establish rights to inclusive education and reasonable accommodation, but real-world implementation remains inconsistent and limited.

NEP 2020 is described as partially progressive, especially in its recognition of neurodiversity and support for flexible learning and vocational education. However, it is criticized for insufficient attention to students with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities, weak differentiation in learning outcomes, and a shortage of trained special educators.

The discussion highlights systemic issues such as poorly implemented vocational tracking, unequal access to disability certification (UDID system), and gaps between policy and school-level practice. A case study of teachers shows that many lack training and support, making inclusive education difficult in real classrooms.

Overall, the text concludes that while India has strong legal and policy commitments to inclusive education, significant gaps remain between policy intentions and actual classroom practice, especially for marginalized students with intersecting disadvantages.

Conclusion

NEP 2020 represents both a genuine advance and a missed opportunity in India\'s pursuit of inclusive education. Its endorsement of universal design for learning, its recognition of neurodiversity, its commitment to transforming teacher education, and its articulation of an equity framework that encompasses disability are meaningful contributions to the policy landscape. They represent a qualitative improvement over previous education policies in the depth of engagement with disability as a dimension of educational equity. Yet the Policy\'s aspirations remain, in large measure, aspirations. The structural conditions for their realisation — adequately trained teachers, accessible infrastructure, sufficient special educators, ring-fenced funding, integrated monitoring systems, and a coherent rights-based framework — are not yet in place. And the intersectional dimensions of disability, which are most acute for students who experience marginalisation along multiple axes simultaneously, receive insufficient attention in a policy framework that tends to treat social categories as parallel rather than intersecting. The students most at risk of educational exclusion in India are not those with disabilities in the abstract, but those with disabilities who are also poor, who are also Dalit or Adivasi, who are also girls, who also live in rural areas, and who also attend under-resourced government schools with overworked and under-trained teachers. NEP 2020 will be judged, ultimately, not by its language but by whether it makes a measurable difference to the life chances of these students. That judgment remains, for the moment, pending — contingent on the seriousness and specificity with which the Policy\'s implementation is pursued in the years ahead. This article has argued that realising NEP 2020\'s potential for disability inclusion requires a deepening of policy coherence, an expansion of institutional capacity, a ring-fencing of financial commitment, and a genuine embrace of intersectional thinking. None of these is beyond the capacity of the Indian state. What is required is political will proportionate to the scale of the injustice — a will to place the most marginalised learners, those at the intersection of disability and multiple other forms of disadvantage, at the centre of educational planning rather than at its periphery.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2026 Shreya Khanna. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.