SugamyaWeb — India's Cloud-Based Accessibility Testing Platform for Government Websites

Launched in December 2022 by India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology alongside the National Informatics Centre, SugamyaWeb is a cloud-based, self-service platform that lets government departments scan their own websites against the accessibility requirements of the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites and Apps (GIGW), which incorporate WCAG standards, and get a prioritised list of fixes.
By its own reporting, the platform has been adopted by more than 200 government departments — a later count puts it at 253 — covering over 400 websites and helping resolve more than 100,000 individual accessibility defects; under the newer GIGW 3.0 standard the tool has since tested over 1,500 websites and logged more than 350,000 resolved issues.
SugamyaWeb sits inside the wider Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan (Accessible India Campaign), the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities' national programme, launched in 2015, to make the built environment, transport and ICT accessible.
The self-testing tool's uptake has not translated into the campaign's headline target: independent reporting by Newslaundry in September 2024 found the number of certified-accessible central-government websites had been stuck at 95 since 2020, that only 676 of roughly 6,700 state and union-territory government websites were accessible (and just 476 of those still live), and that the Accessible India Campaign's own budget had been cut by more than a third between 2022–23 and 2023–24. SugamyaWeb shows that self-service tooling can drive department-level fixes at scale, but sustained political and budgetary commitment is what turns tool adoption into a fully accessible public web.

Read the full analysis: https://sugamyaweb.gov.in/landing/background.html