[10] India is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, having signed the treaty on 30 March 2007 and ratified it on 1 October 2007.
[14] Under the new legislation, all institutions of higher education run or funded by the government must reserve 5% of their spaces for enrollment for people with disabilities.
In some places, people with disabilities are seen as wicked or deceitful, or as unable to progress to adulthood and dependent on charity and pity for assistance.
[4] India's Hindi-language cinema has often reinforced negative stereotypes about people with disabilities, but more recently it has produced several films that have helped raise awareness.
[23] A recurrent theme has for a long time been that disability is a punishment for misdeeds, for instance in Jeevan Naiya (1936), Aadmi (1968), and Dhanwan (1981).
[23] Characters with mental disabilities have frequently been used as comic relief, a trend which has been criticized by Dinesh Bhugra as reinforcing social stigma.
[23] Atanu Mohapatra identifies several ways in which women with disabilities are misrepresented in Hindi films as compared to men with disabilities: they are included less frequently, they very rarely win the love of able-bodied men despite the converse often being the case, they are much less likely to become self-supporting economically, and they are not included unless they are physically attractive.
The immediate cause for the shift appears to have been an international disability film festival in 2005 facilitated by the Ability Foundation (an Indian NGO).
[23] Black (2005) broke new ground by focusing on a female protagonist with a disability, a girl who is blind, deaf, and mute but succeeds academically after considerable struggle.
[23] Other films including Taare Zameen Par (2007) by famed actor and director Aamir Khan have explored the lives of people with dyslexia, progeria, Asperger syndrome, and amnesia, among other conditions.