January 21, 2026 · 9 months ago
Chetan Bhagat’s Times of India column, “Airport wheelchair abuse shows our love for gaming the system” has the ring of moral certainty. It names a visible problem, expresses collective embarrassment, and then reaches for a familiar diagnosis: Indians lack civic sense, love shortcuts, and must therefore be disciplined by stricter rules and penalties. It is a satisfying argument. It is also a shallow one.
The whe elchair controversy is real. The numbers cited by airlines are genuinely startling. But what Bhagat presents as evidence of a uniquely Indian moral failing is, in fact, evidence of a badly designed system that forces very different needs into a single channel and then blames users for responding rationally to those incentives.
The first mistake in Bhagat’s framing is analytical: he collapses all non-obvious wheelchair use into “abuse.” In reality, there are at least three distinct groups using wheelchair services. There are passengers with genuine mobility impairments. There are elderly travelers who can technically walk but fatigue easily, especially after long-haul flights and long terminal distances. And there are parents of immigrants—often non-English speakers—whose children book wheelchair assistance not to “hack” the system but to ensure that their parents are guided safely through a confusing, intimidating, and linguistically hostile environment. Treating these groups as morally equivalent guarantees bad policy.
This matters because wheelchair assistance today is not merely a mobility aid. It has quietly become a bundled service that solves several unrelated problems at once: physical fatigue, wayfinding, language and process mediation, anxiety about missing connections, and the very real fear of elderly parents being stranded in unfamiliar airports. When a single free service provides all of this—while also bypassing queues and offering priority handling—it will be overused. Not because people are uniquely unethical, but because systems that bundle high benefits at zero cost inevitably attract demand far beyond their original intent.
Bhagat acknowledges this incentive structure himself, describing high personal gain and weak enforcement. Yet his prescriptions—heavier penalties, stricter rules, civic education—directly contradict his own diagnosis. In an environment where enforcement is structurally weak, penalties do not deter misuse; they introduce discretion. Discretion, in turn, produces harassment, arbitrariness, and cruelty, almost always directed at the weakest users. Anyone familiar with Indian public administration knows how this ends: elderly passengers questioned, disabled travelers suspected, staff forced into confrontations they are neither trained nor empowered to handle.
The repeated call for “civic sense” fares no better. Civic virtue does not emerge because citizens are lectured by columnists. It emerges when systems are predictable, fair, and designed to allow honest behavior. There is also a troubling undertone in Bhagat’s essay: a performative distancing from “those Indians” who embarrass us abroad. The rhetoric of shame—“be grateful your legs work,” “walk, do your daily steps”—may feel morally cleansing to a certain readership, but it obscures the structural reality. Many of the people using wheelchairs are not fraudsters hacking premium lounge access; they are older parents from small towns, traveling alone across continents for the first time, unable to read signs, terrified of immigration counters, and booked into assistance by children trying to reduce risk from thousands of miles away. To dismiss this as mere system-gaming is not sophistication; it is social blindness.
If we want to reduce wheelchair misuse without harming genuine users, the solution lies not in punishment but in unbundling. Wheelchairs should be clearly framed and designed as mobility aids, not VIP passes. Priority boarding, lounge access, and fast-track immigration should not be automatic accompaniments. At the same time, airports and airlines must create distinct, dignified alternatives for the very needs currently being smuggled through wheelchair requests.
A senior assistance category—free, age-based, and non-medical—could offer guided navigation, seating priority, limited buggy transport, and language support without implying disability. An affordable paid “meet-and-assist” service, marketed explicitly as comfort and peace of mind rather than disability support, would attract precisely the travelers currently abusing the free system for convenience. When honest options exist, most people choose them. Abuse thrives not because people are immoral, but because systems force dishonesty as the only viable expression of legitimate needs.
Even small changes in choice architecture can have outsized effects. Booking interfaces that distinguish between “wheelchair (unable to walk long distances)” and “senior or language assistance” would immediately shift behavior. Clear but non-accusatory messaging about limited wheelchair capacity would reset social norms without confrontation. Time-based friction—such as deprioritizing wheelchair escorts for those without urgent mobility needs—would quietly discourage opportunistic use while protecting those who genuinely depend on the service.
None of this requires moral grandstanding. None of it requires interrogating passengers or demanding certificates. And none of it rests on the fantasy that India can be scolded into civic virtue. It rests instead on a basic principle that Bhagat’s article gestures toward but never embraces: people respond to incentives. If we design public goods intelligently, abuse becomes unattractive without cruelty. If we design them poorly, no amount of shame or punishment will save them.
The wheelchair debate is not a referendum on Indian character. It is a case study in how institutional laziness gets reframed as cultural pathology. We can keep writing angry columns about “gaming the system,” or we can do the harder work of redesigning systems so they no longer invite gaming in the first place. Only one of those approaches will actually help the people who need it.