When a visually impaired employee joined Godrej Capital, the company assumed its office infrastructure was ready. The lifts had audio announcements. The systems, on paper, were accessible.
They were not.
“During office rush hours, the sound gets muffled,” says Bhavya Mishra, the firm’s chief human resources officer. “He couldn’t hear it.” A small failure, but a revealing one. The system worked in theory and broke in use.
Corporate India has become adept at designing inclusion. Policies, frameworks, and training modules are in place. Godrej Capital is discovering that design does not guarantee experience. Inclusion behaves less like a blueprint and more like a feedback loop. It improves only when someone tries to use it and points out where it fails.
“I wouldn’t underestimate policy-level inclusion,” Mishra says. “It’s really important.” But she is equally clear about its limits. “Sometimes when we focus only on policy, but not actually getting people in from this cohort, it stays only at that level,” she believes.
The distinction is subtle but significant: inclusion does not deepen through intent alone—it evolves through exposure.
The lift episode is illustrative rather than unique. “You only learn when the person is actually in the environment,” Mishra says. “When they tell you what works and what doesn’t.”
Disability, by its nature, resists standardisation. A ramp solves one problem. It does little for screen compatibility, auditory navigation, or the dynamics of a team meeting. “There are so many different disabilities, and each comes with a range,” Mishra says. “Even with the best intent, we don’t always know what the person requires.” That uncertainty makes inclusion difficult to pre-design. It also makes it difficult to scale.
“Respect, for us, is about enabling people to succeed because we believe in their talent.”
Bhavya Mishra, CHRO, Godrej Capital
The company’s numbers reflect this. Persons with disabilities make up around 1 per cent of the workforce at Godrej Capital. Overall diversity stands at roughly 24 to 25 per cent, driven largely by gender, with another 1 per cent from the LGBTQIA+ community.
“It should be larger,” Mishra concedes. She frames the current state as a stage rather than an outcome. “I don’t want to get people in just for the sake of it and then not ensure they have a career,” she says. “Respect, for us, is about enabling people to succeed because we believe in their talent.”
It is a reasonable position, though one that places emphasis on readiness over rapid expansion. Similar figures have persisted across much of corporate India for years, often accompanied by the same language of careful, quality-first progress. The test for Godrej Capital is whether its 1 per cent shifts meaningfully over time.
Where the company’s approach sharpens is in its treatment of technology. Mishra draws a distinction that sounds simple but carries weight. “For most of us, technology makes things easier,” she says. “For persons with disabilities, it makes things possible.”
Assistive tools, text-to-speech systems, and customised interfaces are not add-ons in this framing. They are core infrastructure. The company has worked with the Godrej Group’s DEI Lab to map available solutions and hosted an assistive-technology conference to survey what exists. “There’s a lot of innovation happening,” Mishra notes, “but access is still limited because of cost.” The constraint is less about invention and more about adoption.
On the ground, the friction is often simpler. Managers do not always know how to respond to employees with disabilities. “Can I ask this question? Is it too personal? Will this change team dynamics?” Mishra says these uncertainties are common and not necessarily signs of unwillingness.
Her prescription is direct. “The best thing is to be honest. Tell the person you don’t know enough, and ask how you can enable them.” It sounds straightforward. In practice, it asks managers to admit gaps in knowledge, something corporate hierarchies do not always reward.
Perhaps the most counterintuitive argument Mishra makes is against the idea of readiness itself. Many organisations insist on building awareness and preparing systems before hiring from underrepresented groups. She considers this approach misplaced.
“Many organisations feel they need to be fully ready before they hire. But it doesn’t work like that.”
Her contention is that inclusion is built through participation, not preparation. Systems improve only when they are used, challenged, and adjusted. Waiting for completeness delays the very learning that completeness requires. You cannot debug a system that no one is using.
Godrej Capital’s approach remains, by its own admission, a work in progress. It has a dedicated DEI team, engagement mechanisms, and a willingness to talk about failure, including the muffled lift and the incomplete technology audit. Such openness is still relatively uncommon in Indian corporate life. But the workforce numbers remain small, and the interventions largely iterative. The broader barriers to disability employment in India, including social stigma, inaccessible public infrastructure, and weak enforcement, sit well beyond any single firm’s control.
Mishra is clear-eyed about the limits of good intentions. “The path to hell is paved with great intent,” she says. “At some point, it doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is what people experience.”
She urges companies to disaggregate their data rather than hiding behind averages. “What are women saying versus men? What is that 5 per cent saying? Even one voice pointing out a flaw matters.”
That instinct to prioritise the outlier over the aggregate is worth more than most of the inclusion rhetoric that Indian boardrooms currently produce. Inclusion, as the company is discovering, is not a destination declared but a series of corrections made.
The lifts still announce the floors. Whether anyone can hear them depends on who is in the building.