Chapter 06: Time Horizons for Disability Inclusion – From Immediate Access to Long-Term Systems Change

This report was developed as part of HSBC India’s partnership with Dasra to strengthen the disability ecosystem in India through a landscape study, stakeholder consultations, a nonprofit diagnostic survey, and the design of a longer-term ecosystem-strengthening initiative. It builds on a shared commitment to examining disability inclusion not as a narrow sectoral concern, but as a structural question that cuts across institutions, lifecycles, and systems.

We are grateful to HSBC India for their support, partnership, and belief in the importance of investing in evidence, institutional strengthening, and long-horizon thinking for disability inclusion. We are especially thankful to Aloka Majumdar for her stewardship of this work and for helping anchor the report within a broader commitment to strategic, sustained action on disability inclusion. The research and report were led by the Research and Insights team at Dasra, in collaboration with Cohorts & Training, and Catalytic Philanthropy teams, with contributions spanning research design, stakeholder engagement, analysis, synthesis, and strategic direction. The broader project team and leadership team guiding this work included Neera Nundy, Deval Sanghavi, Ami Misra, Pratyaksha Jha, Yash Thakoor, Rukmini Banerjee, Arshiya Uraizee, Unaiza Rajan, Kavneet Kaur, Jija Dutt, Harshita Maheshwari, Shrestha Satpathy, Divya Puri, Jessica Bernard, Gaurvi Singhvi, and Ayush Mehrotra. We extend our sincere appreciation to the nonprofit leaders, disability rights practitioners, funders, researchers, intermediaries, and other ecosystem actors who shared their time, experiences, and reflections with us through interviews, focus group discussions, and consultations. Their insights made it possible to understand the disability ecosystem through the operational realities, tensions, and forms of care, translation, and continuity that hold it together in practice. The report also draws on the responses of 109 organizations that participated in the online survey, whose contributions helped anchor the analysis in patterns visible across the broader nonprofit landscape. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Atypical Advantage for serving as the accessibility consultant for this report and for their valuable guidance in helping make this publication more inclusive and accessible.

Above all, we acknowledge persons with disabilities, caregivers, and community actors whose lives, labor, and daily negotiations with exclusion sit beneath every institutional question this report asks. Even where they are not always directly visible in the research process, their realities shape the field, and their experiences remain central to any meaningful account of disability inclusion in India. We are conscious that this report draws on knowledge produced through lived experience, movement-building, practice, and long years of work across the ecosystem. We hope it contributes, in however partial a way, to efforts aimed at building a more accountable, inclusive, and dignified social order.