For most of the twentieth century, Indian law answered the question "where should a disabled person live?" with a single, custodial reply: an asylum, a beggars' home, or an institution where the person was warehoused, hidden and forgotten. Section 5 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 reverses that logic. It declares that persons with disabilities shall have the right to live in the community, and it places a positive duty on the appropriate Government to ensure they are not herded into any particular living arrangement but are instead given a range of in-house, residential and community support services. This chapter unpacks Section 5 clause by clause, traces its roots in Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and reads it against the Supreme Court's deinstitutionalisation jurisprudence, culminating in Reena Banerjee v. Government of NCT of Delhi (2025).

What Section 5 Actually Says

Section 5 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 is short but foundational. Sub-section (1) states a bald entitlement: "The persons with disabilities shall have the right to live in the community." Sub-section (2) then converts that abstract right into a programmatic obligation on the State. It provides that the appropriate Government shall endeavour that persons with disabilities are (a) not obliged to live in any particular living arrangement; and (b) given access to a range of in-house, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance necessary to support living with due regard to age and gender.

Two design choices deserve attention. First, sub-section (1) uses the mandatory "shall have the right" — the right itself is unconditional. Second, sub-section (2) uses the softer verb "shall endeavour," signalling a progressive-realisation obligation on the State to build the support infrastructure that makes the right meaningful. The right is absolute; the State's duty to resource it is progressive. This pairing mirrors the architecture of socio-economic rights generally, and it is the fault-line on which most litigation under Section 5 turns. For the broader scheme of statutory entitlements that Section 5 sits within, see our chapter on the rights and entitlements under the Act.

From Charity to Rights: Why the Provision Exists

Section 5 is a deliberate repudiation of the custodial model that preceded it. Under colonial and post-colonial statutes — the Indian Lunacy Act, 1912, the Mental Health Act, 1987, and even much practice under the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995 — the default response to disability, especially psychosocial and intellectual disability, was segregation. People were placed in mental asylums, "homes," and custodial institutions on the assumption that they could not live among others. The institution, not the family or neighbourhood, was treated as the natural habitat of the disabled person.

The 2016 Act, enacted to give effect to India's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ratified by India on 1 October 2007), inverts that assumption. Community living is the rule; institutionalisation is the narrow, justified exception. This shift from a charity-and-custody model to a rights-and-inclusion model is the connective tissue running through the entire statute, and it is best understood alongside the Act's introductory framework and objects, which explain the paradigm change the legislature was attempting.

The CRPD Roots: Article 19 and the Right to Live Independently

Section 5 is the domestic enactment of Article 19 of the CRPD, titled "Living independently and being included in the community." Article 19 recognises the equal right of all persons with disabilities to live in the community with choices equal to others, and obliges States Parties to take effective measures to ensure that disabled persons (a) have the opportunity to choose their place of residence and where and with whom they live, and are not obliged to live in a particular living arrangement; (b) have access to in-home, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance; and (c) can access community services and facilities available to the general population on an equal basis.

The CRPD Committee's General Comment No. 5 (2017) on Article 19 makes the core principle explicit: the right to community living is not a mere right to a roof, but a right to choice and control over one's own life. Crucially, the Committee reads Article 19 as requiring deinstitutionalisation — the phasing out of segregated congregate settings — rather than merely improving conditions inside them. Indian courts have drawn directly on this international standard. Because India has ratified the CRPD, the Convention is a legitimate aid to interpreting Section 5; the Supreme Court used precisely this technique in Jeeja Ghosh v. Union of India and Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission, treating the CRPD as informing the content of constitutional and statutory disability rights.

"Not Obliged to Live in Any Particular Living Arrangement"

Clause (a) of Section 5(2) is the anti-institutionalisation kernel of the provision. The phrase "not obliged to live in any particular living arrangement" does two things. Negatively, it prohibits the State from compelling a disabled person into a designated setting — an asylum, a beggars' home, a custodial institution — as the price of receiving care or support. Positively, it implies a right of choice: the person decides where, and with whom, to live.

This is significant because so much institutionalisation in India has historically been involuntary and indefinite. People were admitted to mental health establishments or homes and then never left, not because they needed continued care but because there was nowhere else for them to go and no support to live elsewhere. Section 5(2)(a), read with Section 5(2)(b)'s promise of community support services, attacks exactly this trap. It is reinforced by Section 19 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which separately guarantees every person with mental illness the right to live in, and not be segregated from, society — expressly providing that a person shall not continue to remain in a mental health establishment merely because they have no family, are not accepted by their family, are homeless, or because community-based facilities are absent.

Community Support Services and Personal Assistance

Clause (b) of Section 5(2) supplies the practical scaffolding without which the right to community living would be a hollow promise. It commits the appropriate Government to provide "a range of in-house, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance." The drafting is deliberately broad: "a range" of services, spanning support delivered in the person's own home, support in community residential settings, and personal assistance — that is, a human helper for daily activities — calibrated with "due regard to age and gender."

The age-and-gender qualifier matters. A disabled child, an elderly disabled woman, and a young disabled man may each need very different forms of support, and the provision instructs the State to tailor services accordingly rather than offering a one-size-fits-all institutional placement. This clause connects directly to the Act's social-security and healthcare guarantees: Section 24 (social security, including support to live independently), Section 25 (healthcare close to the community), and Section 38 (special provisions and high-support assessment for those with high support needs). Together these provisions form the support ecosystem that makes Section 5(1)'s right operational, and they overlap substantially with the broader entitlements regime of the statute.

Reena Banerjee and the Deinstitutionalisation Mandate (2025)

The most important judicial articulation of the community-living principle is the Supreme Court's decision in Reena Banerjee v. Government of NCT of Delhi, 2025 INSC 1101 (decided 12 September 2025, per Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta JJ.). The proceedings combined a 1998 public interest litigation on the implementation of disability legislation with a later petition arising from conditions at Asha Kiran, a Delhi government-run home for persons with cognitive and intellectual disability. Media and official reports had revealed overcrowding, abuse, poor sanitation, inadequate healthcare and a series of custodial deaths within the institution.

Rather than merely ordering better conditions inside Asha Kiran, the Court embraced the deinstitutionalisation logic of Section 5 and CRPD Article 19. It directed a gradual shift towards community-based support systems and rehabilitation, individualised care plans for residents, and full participation in society over institutional confinement. To enforce this, the Court established a nationwide monitoring framework — popularly described as "Project Ability Empowerment" — assigning National Law Universities to inspect and report on disability homes across the country, assessing accessibility, healthcare, vocational rehabilitation, grievance redressal, staffing and statutory compliance. Reena Banerjee is therefore the clearest Indian authority that improving an institution is not enough: the constitutional and statutory goal is to move people out of segregated settings and into the community wherever possible.

Jeeja Ghosh: Dignity as the Foundation of Inclusion

The right to live in the community presupposes the right to move through, and participate in, the community on equal terms. The Supreme Court's decision in Jeeja Ghosh v. Union of India, (2016) 7 SCC 761 (Sikri and R.K. Agrawal JJ.), supplies that dignity foundation. Jeeja Ghosh, an academic and activist with cerebral palsy, was forcibly off-loaded from a SpiceJet flight at Kolkata on the assumption that she was unfit to fly. The Court held the airline's conduct violated her right to live with dignity under Article 21 and awarded her Rs. 10 lakh in compensation, alongside directions for airline staff sensitisation and accessible procedures.

Although decided under the 1995 Act and the constitutional framework, Jeeja Ghosh articulates the principle on which Section 5 rests: persons with disabilities are full members of society entitled to participate in public life, not objects of pity to be managed or excluded. The judgment's emphasis on dignity and equal participation feeds directly into the community-living ideal — a person cannot meaningfully "live in the community" if she can be ejected from transport, denied access to public spaces, or treated as a problem to be removed. This dignity-and-participation thread also animates the Act's guarantee of equality and non-discrimination.

Vikash Kumar and Reasonable Accommodation

Community living is impossible without reasonable accommodation — the duty to make adjustments so disabled persons can participate equally. The Supreme Court's three-judge decision in Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission (decided 11 February 2021) is the leading authority. The appellant had writer's cramp (dysgraphia), a chronic neurological condition that was neither a recognised disability nor a certified benchmark disability under the Act, and the UPSC had denied him a scribe for the Civil Services Examination.

The Court held that reasonable accommodation is a facet of substantive equality and that its denial amounts to discrimination under Section 3 of the RPwD Act. It rejected the "fundamental fallacy" that only persons certified with 40% or more disability deserve accommodation, holding that a person with disability under the Act — not merely a person with benchmark disability — is entitled to support. The relevance to Section 5 is direct: the community support services and personal assistance promised by Section 5(2)(b) are themselves species of reasonable accommodation, and Vikash Kumar establishes that the State must read accommodation duties expansively and purposively rather than through narrow, percentage-based gatekeeping. The case also illustrates why the Act's definitional architecture — distinguishing "person with disability" from "person with benchmark disability" — is so consequential.

Home, Family and Section 9: Community Living for Children

Section 5 is reinforced by Section 9 of the Act, which protects the right to home and family. Section 9(1) provides that no child with a disability shall be separated from his or her parents on the ground of disability, except by an order of a competent court made, if required, in the best interest of the child. Where the parents are unable to care for a child with a disability, Section 9(2) directs that the competent court shall place the child with near relations, and failing that within the community in a family setting, and only in exceptional cases in a shelter home run by the Government or a non-governmental organisation.

The hierarchy is telling and tracks the community-living ethos exactly: family first, then near relations, then a family-like community setting, with institutional placement as the last resort. Section 9 thus prevents disability from being used as a pretext for separating children from their families — a common historical abuse — and embeds the principle that even when family care fails, the response should keep the child within the community rather than warehousing them. Read together, Sections 5 and 9 establish that community living is not merely an adult entitlement but a life-course right beginning in childhood.

The phrase in Section 5(2)(a) — that a person is "not obliged to live in any particular living arrangement" — assumes that disabled persons can and must make choices about their own lives. This connects community living to the wider question of legal capacity and autonomy. The Supreme Court anticipated this theme in Suchita Srivastava v. Chandigarh Administration, (2009) 9 SCC 1, where a woman with intellectual disability, who had been raped in a government welfare institution and become pregnant, wished to carry the pregnancy to term while the Chandigarh Administration sought to terminate it.

The Court refused to override her expressed wishes. It held that the State must respect the personal autonomy and reproductive choice of a woman with intellectual disability, and rejected a paternalistic "best interests" override of her clearly expressed will, expressly invoking India's ratification of the CRPD. Suchita Srivastava is not a Section 5 case, but its logic is the same logic the provision encodes: disability does not extinguish the capacity to choose, and the State's role is to support decision-making, not to substitute its own judgment for the person's. A right to choose where and how one lives is meaningless if the law treats disabled persons as incapable of choosing at all.

Accessibility as a Precondition of Community Living

One cannot live in a community one cannot physically enter. The Supreme Court's accessibility jurisprudence is therefore an essential complement to Section 5. In Rajive Raturi v. Union of India, (2018) 2 SCC 413, the Court (Sikri J.) issued eleven directions to make public infrastructure — railway stations, transport, government buildings and websites — accessible to persons with visual and other disabilities, drawing on the RPwD Act and the Accessible India Campaign.

The litigation continued, and in a significant follow-up judgment reported as Rajive Raturi v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 858 (8 November 2024), the Supreme Court held that Rule 15 of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules, 2017 was ultra vires the parent Act because it rendered accessibility standards merely recommendatory rather than mandatory, and directed the Union to frame compulsory accessibility norms in consultation with stakeholders. Alongside Disabled Rights Group v. Union of India (15 December 2017), which addressed reservation and accessibility in higher education, these cases establish that the State's duty to build an accessible environment is a binding obligation. Without enforceable accessibility, Section 5's promise of community living collapses into a paper right — a person formally entitled to live in the community but practically locked out of its schools, transport, workplaces and public buildings.

The "Shall Endeavour" Clause: Is the Right Enforceable?

A recurring examination question is whether Section 5 creates a judicially enforceable right or a mere aspiration. The answer requires parsing the two sub-sections separately. Section 5(1) — "persons with disabilities shall have the right to live in the community" — is an unqualified rights-conferring provision and is plainly justiciable: a disabled person compelled into involuntary, indefinite institutionalisation can invoke it, reinforced by Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution as read in Jeeja Ghosh.

Section 5(2), by contrast, uses "shall endeavour," which courts have generally treated as imposing a progressive-realisation duty rather than an immediately enforceable command to provide a specific service in a specific place. But "endeavour" is not a licence for inaction. Reena Banerjee demonstrates that courts will scrutinise whether the State is genuinely endeavouring — and where institutions are sites of abuse and custodial death, courts will issue structural directions, appoint monitors, and compel a shift towards community-based alternatives. The realistic reading for exam purposes is therefore: the right in 5(1) is enforceable now; the support obligation in 5(2) is enforceable as a duty of good-faith, demonstrable progress, policed through continuing mandamus and structural remedies rather than one-off orders.

Implementation Gaps and Continuing Challenges

The gap between Section 5 on paper and community living in practice remains wide. India's deinstitutionalisation record is uneven: mental health establishments, beggars' homes, and custodial institutions continue to house people who could live in the community with adequate support, and the community support services promised by Section 5(2)(b) — personal assistance, in-home support, supported housing — are thinly resourced and unevenly available across States.

The CRPD Committee's monitoring of Article 19 globally identifies precisely these failures: slow deinstitutionalisation and underdeveloped community support are the two most persistent implementation problems, and India is no exception. The Reena Banerjee monitoring framework is an attempt to close this gap by creating ongoing oversight of institutions, but durable progress depends on budgetary commitment to community alternatives — supported housing, personal-assistance schemes, day-care and rehabilitation in the neighbourhood, and social-security support under Section 24 that actually enables independent living. Until that infrastructure exists at scale, the right declared in Section 5(1) will outrun the State's delivery of the support that Section 5(2) promises. This is the central tension every aspirant should be able to articulate: a strong rights declaration coupled with a still-emerging support system.

Exam Pointers and Synthesis

For judiciary and CLAT-PG purposes, master the following synthesis. Provision: Section 5(1) confers the right to live in the community; Section 5(2) places a progressive-realisation duty on the appropriate Government to ensure persons are not obliged to live in any particular arrangement (clause a) and have access to a range of community support services and personal assistance with due regard to age and gender (clause b). International source: Article 19 CRPD and General Comment No. 5, requiring choice, control and deinstitutionalisation. Allied provisions: Section 9 (home and family; child not to be separated on ground of disability; family-first hierarchy), Section 24 (social security), Section 25 (healthcare), Section 38 (high support); and Section 19 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 (parallel right to community living for persons with mental illness).

Key cases to cite: Reena Banerjee v. Government of NCT of Delhi, 2025 INSC 1101 (deinstitutionalisation, Asha Kiran, nationwide monitoring); Jeeja Ghosh v. Union of India, (2016) 7 SCC 761 (dignity and equal participation under Article 21); Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission (2021) (reasonable accommodation as substantive equality, expansive reading beyond benchmark disability); Suchita Srivastava v. Chandigarh Administration, (2009) 9 SCC 1 (autonomy and legal capacity); and Rajive Raturi v. Union of India, (2018) 2 SCC 413 and 2024 INSC 858 (accessibility as a mandatory precondition). For the wider statutory map, revisit the RPwD Act hub and the chapters on protection from cruelty, inhuman treatment and abuse and rights and entitlements.

Frequently asked questions

What does Section 5 of the RPwD Act, 2016 guarantee?

Section 5(1) guarantees that persons with disabilities shall have the right to live in the community. Section 5(2) requires the appropriate Government to endeavour that they are not obliged to live in any particular living arrangement and are given access to a range of in-house, residential and other community support services, including personal assistance, with due regard to age and gender.

How is Section 5 connected to the CRPD?

Section 5 is the domestic enactment of Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ratified by India on 1 October 2007), titled 'Living independently and being included in the community.' The CRPD Committee's General Comment No. 5 reads Article 19 as requiring genuine choice, control over one's life, and deinstitutionalisation — not merely better conditions inside institutions.

Which Supreme Court case is most important for the right to community living?

Reena Banerjee v. Government of NCT of Delhi, 2025 INSC 1101 (12 September 2025). Arising from custodial deaths and abuse at the Asha Kiran home in Delhi, the Court directed a shift towards community-based support and individualised rehabilitation and established a nationwide monitoring framework for disability homes, making it the clearest Indian authority on deinstitutionalisation.

Does Section 5 mean institutions are completely banned?

No. Section 5 makes community living the rule and institutionalisation the narrow exception. A person cannot be obliged to live in a particular arrangement, and under Section 19 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 cannot be kept in an establishment merely for lack of family or housing. But residential and shelter facilities may still be used in exceptional cases, as Section 9 contemplates for children when family and community placement fail.

Is the right under Section 5 judicially enforceable?

The right in Section 5(1) to live in the community is unqualified and enforceable, reinforced by Articles 14 and 21 as in Jeeja Ghosh v. Union of India. Section 5(2) uses 'shall endeavour,' imposing a progressive-realisation duty; courts treat it as a good-faith obligation enforced through structural directions and continuing oversight, as Reena Banerjee demonstrates, rather than an immediate command to provide a specific service.

How does reasonable accommodation relate to community living?

Community support services and personal assistance under Section 5(2)(b) are themselves forms of reasonable accommodation. In Vikash Kumar v. Union Public Service Commission (11 February 2021), the Supreme Court held that reasonable accommodation is a facet of substantive equality, that its denial is discrimination under Section 3, and that the duty extends to all persons with disability — not only those with benchmark (40%+) disability.