Care for the Disabled

On Monday, Al-Amin Yusuph, Advisor for Communication and Information, UNESCO India office expressed the view that India was doing a “commendable job” in providing accessible environment to disabled people, but a “lot more needs to be done” to improve the scenario, especially in providing them education and skills. He was speaking on the occasion of the International Day of Disabled Persons, a United Nations sanctioned day, which aims to increase public awareness, understanding and acceptance of such people and to celebrate their achievements and contributions. “We congratulate India for the steps taken, be it political or legislative or social for improving accessibility for them in various public spaces and enhancing their lives in general. But much more needs to be done in India and around the world,” Yusuph said. Perhaps the part of Yusuph’s statement that needs to be emphasized and acted on is that much more needs to be done in India for the disabled than has been done so far.

The major problem in dealing with human disability in India is that many people (including highly educated persons who ought to know better) tend to regard disability as some kind of a disease and even as divine punishment for some sin committed by the person concerned or one or both of his parents. The general attitude of people to disabilities is generally fatalistic as it is about certain diseases. There is very little pragmatism or common sense in people’s attitudes to disabilities. And quite naturally, therefore, there is very little that people expect from those with disabilities even though quite often certain disabilities do not affect cerebral functions at all. The fact that most disabled individuals achieve remarkable success in their chosen fields of activity is often ignored by people without disabilities. And one of the reasons why people with disabilities achieve remarkable success in their chosen fields of activity is that they have to put in greater efforts to convince people that their disabilities have no affect on their efficiency, performance or dedication to work.

Yusuph’s remarks about what India has been able to do about dealing with the problem of human disabilities is somewhat misleading when we make comparisons with what is being done in other countries for the disabled. This is seen in the facilities that most European countries provide very thoughtfully for disabled people. In most of these countries there are facilities for wheelchair movement in all public buildings and public facilities like railway stations, bus terminuses, police stations and law courts. Some countries have separate coaches on trains for the disabled or have a section of a coach earmarked for them. There are cars designed specially for the disabled whose disabilities do not incapacitate them from driving. The problem with India has been that it is far more concerned with rituals than with the task of tackling a problem. We are good at identifying a problem and at waxing eloquent on statistics related to the problem. We are seldom enthusiastic about the implications of a disability for the individual concerned. A familiar example is hearing loss. People often overlook the fact that deafness implies the loss of language since the spoken word is primary to language. Therefore, deafness also leads to language problems, since all language learning comes about through the hearing and imitation of speech. People who have their access to language through the printed word have fairly large gaps in their language acquisition. After all, not everyone is a Helen Keller.

In India, our attitude to disabilities must change drastically if we really mean to do anything about tackling them apart from crooning over the thousands of disabled persons who have managed to secure some kind of government help to cope with their disabilities. Being able to extend help and support to a few thousand disabled persons in India is no more than scratching the problem, considering that the number of persons with disabilities runs into millions. But that apart, a more vital task is to change the attitudes of people to disabled persons and to disabilities so that there is a far more rational and compassionate view of disabilities than we have at present. The process must begin at the school level through appropriate lessons dealing with human disabilities.