A Critical Discourse Analysis of Disability Construction in India's Inclusive Education Policy Texts

Abstract

Inclusive education policy increasingly uses rights-based language, yet policy discourse may continue to construct disabled learners through welfare, administrative, and deficit-oriented assumptions. This study critically examines how disability is represented in India’s inclusive education policy texts. Using a qualitative, document-based Critical Discourse Analysis, the study analysed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and the National Education Policy 2020, with the UNCRPD used as an international rights-based benchmark. A dictionary-guided, CDA-informed rule-based coding procedure was applied to 107 disability-education-relevant units, including 80 from Indian policy texts and 27 from the UNCRPD. The findings show that Indian policy discourse has moved toward rights, equity, access, and inclusion, but this shift remains incomplete. Rights-based construction accounted for 51.85% of UNCRPD coded units but only 11.25% of the Indian corpus, while policy silence or limited elaboration formed the largest Indian category. The study concludes that Indian policy texts construct disability through layered discourses in which rights-based commitments coexist with welfare, support, administrative classification, paternalistic naming, and add-on inclusion, with implications for policy reform.