After a Road Accident Left Him in a Wheelchair, This 14 YO Started Mapping Accessible Places for Others |
At 13, Pratik Shingare began seeing Pune in a way he never had before.
A road accident had left him with multiple fractures, and during recovery, he depended on a wheelchair. The city around him was the same, but suddenly, the smallest things began to decide where he could go.
A step at an entrance. A doorway that felt too narrow. A washroom he could not use. A place that looked accessible online, but became difficult the moment he reached there.
Even going back to school, something he longed for, became uncertain. “I was always at home,” he says. “I missed my friends. I missed school. I just wanted to go back.”
But when he tried to return, his school refused to readmit him. The risk, they said, was too high. Pratik lives with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic condition often referred to as brittle bone disease, where bones fracture easily due to a lack of collagen.
“I was heartbroken,” he tells The Better India. “There were no provisions for students like me.”
Those months changed the way Pratik understood accessibility. For many people with mobility challenges, stepping out begins at home, with a series of worries most people never have to carry: Will there be a ramp? Will the doorway be wide enough? Will the washroom be usable? Will the place be as accessible in real life as it claims to be online?
For Pratik, these questions did not leave easily.
Now at 14, he is building StairlessJourney, an initiative that verifies and maps accessible spaces across Pune, Goa, and Kolkata so people with disabilities can step out with clearer information and less fear.
‘The initiative has given me freedom’
In a little over a year, StairlessJourney has mapped more than 50 accessible locations across Pune, Goa, and Kolkata. For now, it runs through Instagram and LinkedIn, with a website in development.
For those who follow the page, this information brings a small but important reassurance: they can see what a place looks like before deciding to go there.
“Whenever I feel like going out, I just browse their page and pick a place,” says a wheelchair user living with multiple sclerosis, who came across the initiative on Instagram. “StairlessJourney gave me the freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want.”
The audience is still small, with just over 100 followers. But it is also deeply specific. The page speaks to wheelchair users, caregivers, disability advocates, and people who have spent years navigating cities that were not built with their needs in mind.
For Pratik, the need for such information was clear from his own experience. “For people with mobility challenges, finding one accessible place can take weeks,” he says. “And even then, you’re not sure.”
That is why verification sits at the heart of Pratik’s work. Every place his platform maps has been tested, so that........