“How accessible are Tier 1 cities like Pune?” asks Sudhir Shenoy, who writes on leadership, inclusion and philanthropy in a LinkedIn post recently. The answer, unfortunately, was: not very.

As Sudhir and the RunInSync team planned accommodation for wheelchair athletes attending their event, they ran into a problem that disabled people in India know all too well. Many hotels that advertise themselves as “accessible,” have doors that allow wheelchairs to enter bedrooms but not the bathrooms.

Even some luxury hotels have just one accessible room in the entire property, as a result of which their athletes had to be split across multiple hotels, creating expensive, exhausting logistical challenges. But the deeper issue is that accessibility in India is still seen as a niche requirement instead of basic infrastructure.

“Disability isn’t a distant reality,” Sudhir writes. “It can happen to any of us, at any time. And as we age, the chances of us or someone we love living with a disability only increase.”

At Latika, we think about this all the time as we build India’s first fully inclusive campus based on universal design principles. Accessibility isn’t about ticking boxes or adding a ramp as an afterthought. It’s about creating spaces that work beautifully for everyone.

Take our toilets, for example.

Our new building will have 32 toilets designed to meet a huge range of human needs: Indian and Western-style toilets, gender-specific and gender-neutral toilets, wheelchair-accessible toilets, and tiny child-sized toilets for little children who may be frightened of falling into adult-sized seats.

But we’re going further than that.

We’ll also have two Changing Place (CP) toilets, still extraordinarily rare in India. A CP toilet isn’t only for wheelchair users. It includes an adult-sized changing bench and a hydraulic lift system, allowing adults wearing diapers to be changed safely, comfortably and with dignity. Because disabled people should be able to travel, learn, play and participate in public life without humiliation or impossible logistics. This is the kind of feature we mean when we say we aren’t just planning for disabled people, we’re planning for everyone.

Sudhir quoted disability advocate Stella Young in his post: “Disability doesn’t make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.” That’s exactly the shift we hope this building will spark.