By Dr. Muhammad Shabbir
A person with a disability planning a single journey across Pakistan a flight into Islamabad, a train onward to Lahore, a metro bus to the final destination will encounter three entirely different countries. One offers a fare discount. One offers nothing but goodwill. One offers free travel in one city and flatly denies it in another, sometimes on services run by the very same provincial government. This is not accessibility. It is a lottery, and persons with disabilities are tired of playing it.
Pakistan ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2011, committing itself to Article 9’s guarantee of accessibility and Article 20’s guarantee of personal mobility. These are not charitable gestures; they are binding obligations to remove barriers, not to manage them case by case. Yet fifteen years on, the country’s transport concession regime reads less like rights-based policy and more like an accumulation of disconnected circulars, each drafted by a different authority with no shared definition of who qualifies, what they are owed, or how a barrier is even to be recognised.
The framework exists on paper, generously. The ICT Rights of Persons with Disability Act 2020 obligates accessible transportation within Islamabad Capital Territory. The Punjab Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities Act 2022 directs the province to make every mode of transportation accessible and to promote personal mobility “at a concessional cost.” The Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa statutes restate similar commitments. Pakistan Railways offers a 50 percent fare concession on express and passenger trains to anyone presenting a Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC) bearing the disability logo, with a matching discount for an attendant travelling with a person who is blind. Punjab’s Himmat Card goes further, entitling holders to free travel on the Orange Line Metro Train and Metro Bus.
On aviation, the picture has grown thinner still. Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), in line with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) non-discrimination resolution and the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) accessibility guidance, continues to offer pre-notification, in-flight wheelchairs, and priority seating, but the 40 percent fare discount it once extended to persons with disabilities has been withdrawn since April 2026. A PIA spokesperson attributed the move to a broader suspension of passenger discounts amid rising jet fuel prices — yet other domestic carriers operating the very same routes have kept their disability concessions in place throughout. The discrepancy exposes the discount for what it always was: a discretionary courtesy rather than a protected entitlement, revocable by one carrier’s internal cost calculus while a competitor a gate away honours it without interruption. No regulatory instrument obliges any airline to maintain a disability fare concession, and none compels PIA to restore what it withdrew. Reasonable accommodation, in other words, has been reduced for movement within the cabin, but the cost of the ticket itself remains wholly unprotected.
The gap between statute and street is where the real damage occurs. In Sindh, disability-card holders can travel at a discount on intercity trains, yet the province’s own Peoples Bus Service and the Karachi Green Line Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) flagship urban transit projects offer no concession to the same cardholders. A resident of Lahore may ride the metro free; a resident of Karachi, holding an equivalent certificate, pays full fare on a comparable service run by a different tier of the same federation. Railway booking counters interpret the CNIC disability logo requirement inconsistently from station to station, and persons whose certificates predate current formats, or whose impairment is non-visible, frequently report being questioned or turned away outright. Intercity and inter-provincial private bus operators, who carry the overwhelming majority of everyday travellers, occupy a regulatory vacuum of their own: some do offer discretionary discounts, but each demands a different form of proof — a CNIC disability logo here, a provincial disability certificate there, a company-specific card elsewhere — with no common standard a traveller can rely on before showing up at the counter. A person recognised as disabled by one operator’s paperwork may simply not exist, administratively, to the next.
This is not a funding problem. It is a coordination failure — a refusal to treat accessibility as an integrated system rather than a patchwork of provincial afterthoughts. Organisations such as the Pakistan Disability Foundation have raised precisely these inconsistencies at various forums on multiple occasions, yet the response has been sectoral tinkering rather than structural reform. The question therefore is, what reform actually requires
First, the federal government, through the Council on Rights of Persons with Disabilities structures already created under existing legislation, must issue a single national notification establishing a uniform concession floor — applicable across air, rail, intercity bus, and urban transit — recognising one standardised national disability identification instrument rather than requiring separate certificates in every jurisdiction.
Second, private and public transport operators alike must be brought within statutory reach, with the same enforcement mechanism, the same grievance redress window, and the same penalty for refusal, regardless of who owns the vehicle.
Third, provincial transport authorities must publish, and regularly audit, a single accessible register of which concessions apply on which service, closing the information vacuum that currently leaves travellers to discover their rights only by being denied them at the counter.
The CRPD did not ask Pakistan to be generous. It asked Pakistan to remove barriers, consistently, everywhere. Until concession policy stops depending on which province a person happens to be standing in, the promise of equal mobility will remain exactly what it is today: real in the statute book, and unreliable everywhere else.
About the Author: Dr. Muhammad Shabbir is policy expert specializing in strategic studies, digital accessibility, and technology governance, and holds PhD in International Relations. He can be contacted on X: @MShabbirPhD
