India currently speaks in twenty-two tongues. Its Constitution recognises Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, Sanskrit and eighteen others, each carrying with it: state patronage, academic recognition and the promise of preservation. None of these have been extended to the eighteen million Indians who are deaf.
Indian Sign Language is not a simplified gesture system or a workaround for communication barriers. Linguists describe it as possessing a systematic phonology, a productive morphology, a rule-governed syntax and a lexicon capable of expressing abstract and technical ideas.[1] It is, by every measure that matters, a complete natural language. Yet it appears nowhere in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, and the people who use it every day to navigate the world are left to rely on a legal framework that acknowledges their existence while quietly denying their identity.
This piece examines why that framework falls short, what the Constitution already offers and what it would take to finally close the gap.
WHAT THE LAW CURRENTLY OFFERS
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 is the primary instrument through which India addresses the needs of its deaf population. Section 2(r) of the Act defines communication to include sign language,[2] and sections 40 and 42 require electronic media to provide captioning and sign language support and that frequently used digital services be made accessible.[3] The government established the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre in New Delhi on 28 September 2015, an autonomous body tasked with standardising ISL, training interpreters and publishing dictionaries, and the ISLRTC has since produced a lexicon of over 10,000 signs.[4] These are genuine steps. They reflect state engagement with ISL and a real acknowledgment of the deaf community’s needs.
But each of these steps shares a common logic, and that logic is the problem. They treat ISL as a tool. A functional aid. Something the state must accommodate in the way it accommodates ramps outside courthouses. That framing, however well-intentioned, cannot do the work that the deaf community actually needs done, because accommodation and recognition are not the same thing and have never been.
ACCOMODATION IS NOT RECOGNITION
The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution is not merely an administrative list.[5] Inclusion in it brings a language under the constitutional obligation of the state to develop, preserve and promote it. It qualifies the language for funding under the Official Language Commission, representation in national examinations, recognition by the Sahitya Akademi and a presence in parliamentary proceedings. It signals, at the highest level of law, that this language belongs here. The RPWD Act does none of this for ISL. What it offers is closer to what scholars De Meulder and Murray describe as instrumental rights, the basic practical accommodations a society extends to disabled persons, which stop well short of the linguistic and cultural rights that deaf communities actually seek.[6]
WHERE THE LEGAL JOURNEY STANDS
In 2018, disability rights activist Nipun Malhotra filed a public interest litigation before the Delhi High Court seeking the inclusion of ISL in the Eighth Schedule as India’s twenty-third official language. The petition argued violations of Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution and drew upon the provisions of the RPWD Act itself to make the case for formal recognition.[7] The Court issued notice and the matter drew considerable attention, but the petition was ultimately dismissed on the reasoning that adequate legal protection for ISL already existed under the RPWD Act and that the existing framework was sufficient to recognise, preserve and promote sign language.
This reasoning is difficult to defend on close analysis. The question before the Court was not whether ISL users had some legal protections — they do. The question was whether those protections constitute recognition of ISL as a language in the constitutional sense, and they do not. A disability accessibility statute that mentions sign language as a communication mode is categorically different from a constitutional amendment that places a language alongside Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. The Delhi High Court conflated two entirely distinct legal categories and in doing so closed the door on a vital constitutional argument, one that rests not on a single provision but on the convergence of several.
A CONSTITUTION BUILT FOR EQUALITY
The Constitution’s own guarantees make the case hard to dismiss. Article 14 promises equal treatment under the law, yet the state funds and promotes twenty-two languages while the primary language of eighteen million citizens gets nothing equivalent. That is not an oversight, it is an imbalance built into the system. Article 21, which the Supreme Court has long read to mean more than just survival; it covers dignity, education and full participation in public life; which means that a deaf person who cannot access ISL in a courtroom or a government office is being denied something the Constitution already promises them.[8] The Supreme Court confirmed in Rajive Raturi v Union of India that accessibility is a legal right, not something the state provides when it feels like it.[9] Articles 29 and 30 go further still, giving linguistic minorities the right to protect their culture and run their own schools — rights that ISL users cannot claim until their language is formally recognised.
India’s international commitments point in the same direction. When India signed the UNCRPD it agreed, without any reservations, that sign languages must be officially recognised, used in public institutions and treated as genuine languages rather than communication aids.[10] The RPWD Act was supposed to translate that commitment into domestic law. What it delivered instead was a set of accessibility measures – useful, but not the same thing as recognition, and the treaty India signed requires both.[11] The distance between what was promised and what was delivered is not a matter of interpretation, it shows up in the data.
WHAT THE NUMBERS TELL US
Research published in 2025 by Sharma in Language Policy documents that around one in five deaf and hard-of-hearing children in India were out of school as recently as 2014, and that across a country of 1.4 billion people there are only 387 schools specifically for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.[12] These numbers are not accidents. They are the product of a legal framework that has never mandated ISL instruction in mainstream schools, never created enforceable standards for interpreter training and never given the state a positive constitutional duty to develop ISL the way it has for every language on the Eighth Schedule. The ISLRTC’s dictionary and the NEP 2020’s mention of ISL standardisation are meaningful, but they operate in the absence of the legal foundation that would make them binding rather than aspirational. That foundation exists elsewhere, and India has spent long enough watching it from a distance.
WHAT OTHER COUNTRIES DID
Ireland passed the Irish Sign Language Act in 2017, giving ISL official recognition, mandating interpreter access across public services and creating enforceable rights for deaf citizens in courts, healthcare and education.[13] New Zealand recognised New Zealand Sign Language as its third official language through statute in 2006. Italy recognised Italian Sign Language in May 2021. As of 2025, the ‘World Federation of the Deaf’ lists dozens of countries where national sign languages carry explicit constitutional or legislative recognition.[14] What each of these decisions produced was not merely a symbolic gesture. They triggered government funding for interpreter training, ISL curricula in schools, enforceable rights in legal proceedings and a cultural legitimacy that no accessibility provision alone can manufacture. The evidence from countries that have moved in this direction suggests that recognition is structurally transformative in ways that accommodation simply is not.[15] India has both the precedent and the mechanism to do the same thing, and it has had them for decades.
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
The path forward is neither complicated nor without constitutional precedent. Parliament must amend the Eighth Schedule to include ISL. The 92nd Amendment shows that Parliament can and does add languages when there is political will. What is missing here is not legal authority but legislative attention. Alongside this, the Supreme Court should revisit the Delhi High Court’s reasoning: the question of whether RPWD Act protections constitute constitutional linguistic recognition is a question of law that deserves rigorous appellate examination, and the Court’s existing jurisprudence on Article 21 and dignity gives it the tools to do so. Recognising ISL users as a linguistic minority under Articles 29 and 30 would further unlock educational and cultural protections that those provisions were designed to provide, and this requires no constitutional amendment, only the acknowledgment of what linguists have long established: ISL is a language and its speakers are a community.
CONCLUSION
India’s linguistic identity is one of its deepest sources of pride. A Constitution that was careful enough to protect the languages of tribal communities, to guarantee minority educational rights and to establish an entire Commission for official language development is not a constitution indifferent to language. It is a constitution that has simply not yet extended that care to the eighteen million people who speak without sound. Official recognition of ISL would not create a new right from nothing. It would give constitutional grounding to a right that has always existed in principle but has never been backed by the full weight of law. For India’s deaf community, that grounding is not a luxury. It is the minimum that equal citizenship demands, and it is long overdue.
Author(s) Name: Oyishee Bose
References:
[1] Abhimanyu Sharma, ‘India’s language policy for deaf and hard-of-hearing people’ (2025) 24 Language Policy <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10993-025-09729-7> accessed 20 May 2025
[2] Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016, s 2(r)
[3] Ibid ss 40, 42
[4] ‘About Us’ (Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre) <https://islrtc.nic.in/about-us/> accessed 20 May 2025
[5] Constitution of India 1950, sch VIII
[6] Maartje De Meulder and Joseph J Murray, ‘Buttering Their Bread on Both Sides? The Recognition of Sign Languages and the Aspirations of Deaf Communities’ (2017) 41(2) Language Problems and Language Planning 136 <https://benjamins.com/catalog/lplp.41.2.04dem?srsltid=AfmBOoo5IUcQBnaNFBensVMsJAjk8UN53Q0WR6KlbzaTmdgakSG18fMP> accessed 20 May 2025
[7] Nipun Malhotra v Union of India WP(C) 9546/2018
[8] Disability Justice: Court Decisions on Disability Rights in India (Centre for Law and Policy Research 2024) 12
[9] Rajive Raturi v Union of India (2018) 2 SCC 413
[10] UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (adopted 13 December 2006, entered into force 3 May 2008) 2515 UNTS 3, arts 2, 21, 24 and 30
[11] Tanmoy Bhattacharya, ‘Legislation and Policies in Relation to Sign Language and the Indian Legal Framework’ (Academia, 2023) <https://www.academia.edu/97634339> accessed 20 May 2025
[12] Sharma (n 1)
[13] Irish Sign Language Act 2017 (Ireland)
[14] ‘The Legal Recognition of National Sign Languages’ (World Federation of the Deaf) <https://wfdeaf.org/the-legal-recognition-of-national-sign-languages/> accessed 20 May 2025
[15] Maartje De Meulder et al.(eds), The Legal Recognition of Sign Languages: Advocacy and Outcomes Around the World (Multilingual Matters 2019)
