On disability

I woke up from a dream. It wasn’t nice since I was rudely shaken to consciousness. I had to go to the physiotherapy department of the Medical College. As I was waiting in the long corridors, which I assessed then, was clean from sickness, from blood, there was no screaming, nobody was crying; everything was quiet. Then, all of a sudden my eyes fell on this gorgeous fellow; tall and handsome and like all fertile females of my species I gazed upon him. I would have stopped staring hadn’t it been for one reason. He was walking with the help of a stroller. He had only one leg, which had been bandaged so that it could stand the extra pressure. As he walked down the corridor, I kept looking at him. Then an amazing thing happened. He looked at me with a smile. I couldn’t help blinking to keep the tears off. Then I realized why there were no screams, no blood. They were bleeding inside, they were screaming inside. They had the choice to go on, despite the nervous twitches that made that woman in red sari convulse with her every step. Despite the obvious paralysis the man in the wheel chair was in, despite the effort with which the guy, who had his legs cut off from the thighs, tried to hoist himself up and down a special chair to gain practice. Despite their setbacks, these people, they had hope. I twitch when a mosquito bites me or cry when my finger is hurt. I feel pretty pathetic right now.

I know and you know, I hate going into statistics. But this is one of the occasions where they are absolutely necessary. In India there are around 70-80 million disabled persons. What exactly do we mean by the term ‘disability’? Or shall we say, as it is PC now; differently abled. I wasn’t sure. So I decided to look it up. Apparently, in our scenario, disability covers physical disability, visual impairment, hearing impairment, speech disability, locomotors disability and overlapping conditions. It is said that one in every twelve households has to care for someone with disability.

Now, a very small percentage is educated and only around 40% of the disabled are employed in some way or the other. Though there is reservation in Govt jobs up to 3% since 2003, it applies only to loco motor, hearing and visual. But the fact is that they are seldom filled. Here I do wonder how disabled friendly our Govt offices are, both in terms of infrastructure and human relations. In private sector (for obvious reasons), the condition remains abysmally wretched. MNCs employ less than .05% disabled persons in their workforce while the aggregate of the top 100 corporate heavy weights in India employ around .4%. When we talk about social parity, we conveniently neglect certain aspects. We frame policies but seldom approach the implementation at a people centric level.

But, does that mean we have millions of educated disabled people waiting to rush in to fill the vacancies. Yes, there are some. But, not many. Our education system has a high problem with identifying children with special needs and responding to them. In simpler terms, the Taare Zameen Par situation (generalizing) is much more serious than the celluloid representation. There is a 3% reservation of disabled children in schools guaranteed under the Persons with Disabilities Act. Then why is there a hesitation when it comes to admitting them? A large proportion of schools are ignorant of this Act, whether Govt or private. But when it comes to private schools, again we see the proportion dwindling. So social responsibility means nothing to them? But yes, they hardly have to care when the Govt schools themselves have decaying infrastructure which mocks at the personal integrity of an ordinary child, let alone a disabled child.

Why is there such a discrepancy? We stare at the ‘midgets’, we make fun of those with twisted limbs, we don’t know how to behave with someone different. There are ‘them’ and ‘us’. As always. Well, one can argue that the system is struggling to accommodate a billion people with no difficulties and it is bit too much to ask that everything be made ‘differently abled friendly’. Maybe. But are 80 million lives too little a price to be paid for negligence? Here, who becomes the beggar in the street tugging at your dress and looking up at you to have some mercy on him or an ex army man who sells lottery for his daily bread because that’s all he is told he could do? Who becomes the one with prosthetics and has a shot at better life? Economic disparity too reflects in this stratum. But that will not change unless the social and political disparities change. There are a million questions and considerations in this issue. I just hope…. Like the man learning to walk, I just hope.

I really don’t think anyone expressed it better than Martina Navratilova, when she said; Disability is a matter of perception. If you can do just one thing well, you're needed by someone.

We need to find those 80 million different things.