Standing Ovations

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My Sustainable Encounter with Suvarna Raj

by Albert Schiller

3 Lessons in Curing Systemic Apathy

A new, multi-crore building opens its doors. It has a gleaming glass facade, an impressive lobby, and a wheelchair ramp so steep it is a liability. The official explanation will be an "oversight," a regrettable mistake blamed on ignorance or budget constraints. Access Auditor Suvarna Raj has a different verdict. After diagnosing over 650 projects across India, she argues these are not accidents. They are symptoms of a much deadlier disease: "systemic apathy." This diagnosis is based on the harsh realities of a professional who has walked the extra mile when it comes to transforming places of exclusion into spaces of belonging. Her audit offers a curriculum for any leader tired of accepting excuses and ready to cure the indifference in their professional sphere.

"While ignorance and economics contribute to inaccessibility, the real root cause is systemic apathy."

Lesson 1: Kill the Excuse of Ignorance

Your first job as a leader is to make "we didn't know" an unacceptable answer in your organization. As Suvarna Raj points out, ignorance is a problem with an easy cure: education. In a world where the RPWD Act, harmonized guidelines, and universal accessibility codes are publicly available, claiming ignorance is a confession of negligence. When your teams build a project with a glaring accessibility flaw, it is not a lack of knowledge. In her words, it is a "deliberate choice" to remain uninformed. This excuse must not stand. Ask your teams: Did we fail because we lacked the information, or because it was inconvenient to seek it out? One is a training problem that can be fixed with a meaningful workshop. The other is a cultural rot that signals a profound lack of respect for staff and a profitable segment of your customers. Your first act is to remove this mindset and its excuse from your team's vocabulary, permanently. Accountability must become a non-negotiable metric. When your team understands that "I didn't know" indicates a failure of professional responsibility, they will make it their business to know. If they don’t, ask yourself: Did I hire the right people to surround myself with? This is how you shake indifference. It starts by making ignorance an impossible place to hide.

Lesson 2: Your Budget Is Not the Problem. Your Priorities Are.

The second lesson is to dismantle the economics of belonging. According to Suvarna, the most common excuse for inaction is the budget. "It's too expensive." This, she argues, is a fundamental misunderstanding of value. Accessibility is cheapest when it is "designed from the start, and not added as an afterthought". Her audits of multi-crore projects that fail on the most basic accessibility prove her point. “The issue is not a lack of money but a lack of priority". Your job is to reframe this conversation. Stop letting your CFO talk about the cost of building a ramp. Start making your CMO answer for the market share you are losing by having an inaccessible front door. An inaccessible website might be a compliance issue, but it is a leaky bucket, pouring potential revenue into the hands of your competitors, a point that every intelligent business person understands. Accessibility is not an expense to be minimized. It is an investment in a larger customer base, a wider talent pool, and a more resilient business. Blows of fate are unpredictable and often more inconvenient than planning ahead. It is a strategic decision that expands your reach and signals mindfulness, not a charitable line item that drains your budget. When you start framing accessibility in the language of growth and market opportunity, the budget suddenly appears.

Lesson 3: It Is Your Product, Not a Charity Project

The final lesson is to engineer a fundamental shift in your organization's mindset. The root of systemic apathy is the belief that accessibility is a charitable project, a "special feature" for “others”, for a peripheral minority, a friend of a friend talks about. Your final task as a leader is to obliterate this idea. As Suvarna teaches her clients, you must reframe accessibility from a social responsibility initiative to a "core business function". The people you exclude are not a separate group to be "helped." They are your customers. They are your employees. They are essential and most likely part of your inner circle. An inaccessible website is a defective product. An unusable building is a failed service. You must ask your leadership team this: Is accessibility a checkbox on our CSR report, or is it a non-negotiable feature of our core product's usability? Is it, and are we viable? Real progress only begins when your organization sees it as a matter of innovative business and legal compliance, not a favor for the friend of a friend. It begins when you understand that an accessible world is not about being nice. It is about not being dumb.

So what can we take from her approach?

Questions for Audience

1. As leaders, how can we tell compelling, human stories that motivate our teams and stakeholders without accidentally creating a "superhuman" narrative that lionizes individual heroics and obscures underlying systemic problems?

2. In our own lives, where do we consume "inspirational" stories (of athletes, entrepreneurs, etc.) as a substitute for action, allowing their extraordinary success to become a comfortable reason for our own inaction?