Two Disadvantages, One Pension: Anti-Cumulation, Intersectionality and the Right to Social Security of India’s Disabled Elderly

Abstract

India does not lack a pension for its disabled elderly. It maintains three, for old age, widowhood and severe disability, and pays only one. This article asks what that exclusivity costs and whether it is lawful. Using the bare text of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, the National Social Assistance Programme (NSAP) rate structure, State eligibility rules, and official statistics from the Census, the National Sample Survey, the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India and the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey, the study reconstructs the rate architecture and tests it against domestic and international standards. Three findings follow. First, the marginal central assistance attached to severe disability is Rs 100 per month between the ages of 60 and 79, and nothing at all from 80, when all three rates converge at Rs 500. Second, that convergence places the scheme outside the proviso to section 24(1) of the 2016 Act, which requires assistance to persons with disabilities to be at least twenty-five per cent higher than comparable schemes. Third, the disability pension reaches about 8.33 lakh persons of all ages, against roughly 5.6 million elderly persons with disabilities recorded in 2011 alone. The design is single-axis in the sense identified in Patan Jamal Vali v. State of Andhra Pradesh: it requires a claimant to elect one identity and forfeit the rest. Restoring the differential to elderly claimants already identified would cost between Rs 144 crore and Rs 636 crore a year, or 1.5 to 6.6 per cent of the NSAP budget.