Disability in India

Sources have offered widely varying estimates of the prevalence of disability in India. India is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Legislation that affects people with disabilities in India includes the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, the Mental Health Care Act, 2017, the National Trust Act, 1999, and the Rehabilitation Council of India Act, 1992. People with disabilities in India are faced with negative social attitudes in the wider population.

Prevalence

The number of people with disabilities in India was stated as 21 million in the 2001 Census of India.[1] In the 2011 census, the figure rose by 22.4% to 26.8 million.[2] According to the 2011 census, 20.3% of people with disabilities in India have movement disabilities, 18.9% have hearing impairments, and 18.8% have visual impairments. The 2011 census additionally collected data on mental disability for the first time, and found that 5.6% of Indians with disabilities fall into that category.[2]

However, Ghai offered a higher estimate in 2002, of 70 million.[3] The World Health Organization's World Health Survey data from 2002–2004 gave a far higher estimate that 25% of people in India have some form of disability, much higher than the world average, but WHO has acknowledged that this survey suffered from various deficiencies.[4] A 2009 World Bank report estimated that 5-8% of India's population had a disability.[5]

Two analyses of data from a 2004 study in a rural area of Karnataka have estimated the rate of disability to be around 6.3%[6] and the rate of mental disability specifically to be around 2.3%.[7] Data collected in a village in Chandigarh from 2004 to 2005 found the prevalence of disability to be 4.79%.[8] A major study published in 2018 of five sites in India found that 9.2% of children aged 2-5 and 13.6% of children aged 6-9 had at least one of seven neurodevelopmental disorders (vision impairment, epilepsy, neuromotor impairments including cerebral palsy, hearing impairment, speech and language disorders, autism spectrum disorders, and intellectual disability).[9]

Legislation

International

India is a party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, having signed the treaty on 30 March 2007 and ratified it on 1 October 2007.[10]

National

India enacted the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunity, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act in 1995 to provide recognition to the rights and special needs of the disabled in the country.[1] It also provided for reservations for persons with disabilities in government jobs and higher educational institutions.[11] The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 replaced the earlier legislation and increased the number of recognised disabilities from seven to 21.[12] While the 1995 legislation had reserved 3% of government jobs, the new legislation reserves 4%.[13] Under the new legislation, all institutions of higher education run or funded by the government must reserve 5% of their spaces for enrollment for people with disabilities.[13]

The rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities are protected under the Mental Health Care Act, 2017.[14] The Rehabilitation Council of India Act, 1992 created the Rehabilitation Council of India, which is tasked with training rehabilitation professionals and promoting research in rehabilitation and special education.[15] Another law governing disability affairs in India is the National Trust for the Welfare of Persons with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation and Multiple Disabilities Act, 1999, or simply National Trust Act.[15] This law created the National Trust, which is a government body that works with volunteer networks and Disabled People's Organizations and also forms local-level committees that appoint legal guardians for people with disabilities deemed to need them.[15]

Government policy

Issues related to disability are addressed by the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, which falls under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.[15] The government of India has also enacted initiatives such as the Accessible India Campaign to make public spaces and transportation barrier-free for persons with disabilities.[16]

The usage of the term Divyangjan ("those with divine abilities") has been promoted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as an alternative to the term "Persons with Disability".[17] However, disability rights activists called it condescending[18] and derogatory.[19][20]

Social attitudes

People with disabilities in India are often seen as wicked or deceitful, or as unable to progress to adulthood and dependent on charity and pity for assistance.[3] They are also often socially segregated as a results of ingrained cultural and religious attitudes toward disability.[21]

Intersectional aspects

Most people with disabilities in India and their families are focused on survival in the context of deep poverty. India's disability rights movement, however, mainly comprises elite, middle-class activists who generally mirror the goals of the disability rights movement in Western countries.[3]

Disability in India is affected by other social divisions such as class, gender, and caste.[3] Statistics show that women with disabilities in India are more marginalized than their male counterparts.[3] Anita Ghai argues that Indian feminism has ignored the unique conditions of women with disabilities.[3]

In Indian cinema

India's Hindi-language cinema has often reinforced negative stereotypes about people with disabilities, but more recently it has produced several films that have helped raise awareness.[22] A recurrent theme has for a long time been that disability is a punishment for misdeeds, for instance in Jeevan Naiya (1936), Aadmi (1968), and Dhanwan (1981).[22] Characters with mental disabilities have frequently been used as comic relief, a trend which has been criticized by Dinesh Bhugra as reinforcing social stigma.[22] Atanu Mohapatra identifies several ways in which women with disabilities are misrepresented in Hindi films as compared to men with disabilities: they are included less frequently, they very rarely win the love of able-bodied men despite the converse often being the case, they are much less likely to become self-supporting economically, and they are not included unless they are physically attractive.[22]

The decade following 2005 has seen a shift in the representation of people with disabilities by Hindi cinema. The immediate cause for the shift appears to have been an international disability film festival in 2005 facilitated by the Ability Foundation (an Indian NGO).[22] Black (2005) broke new ground by focusing on a female protagonist with a disability, a girl who is blind, deaf, and mute but succeeds academically after considerable struggle.[22] Other films including Taare Zameen Par (2007) by famed actor and director Aamir Khan have explored the lives of people with dyslexia, progeria, Asperger syndrome, and amnesia, among other conditions.[22] There were some earlier precedents to these more well-rounded portrayals, including Koshish (1972) and Sparsh (1980), which explored deafness and blindness respectively.[22] Conversely, some recent Hindi films have continued to display ill-founded stereotypes about people with disabilities.

Also some Tamil film industry movies have portrayed disabled people like the movie Deiva Thirumagal which portrays a mentally challenged father and his daughter.

In sport
Main article: India at the Paralympics

India made its Summer Paralympic début at the 1968 Games, competed again in 1972, and then was absent until the 1984 Games. The country has participated in every edition of the Summer Games since then. It has never participated in the Winter Paralympic Games.[23]

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References
  1. Chavan, B.S.; Rozatkar, Abhijit R. (2014). "Intellectual disability in India: Charity to right based". Indian Journal of Psychiatry. 56 (2): 113–116. doi:10.4103/0019-5545.130477. PMC 4040055. PMID 24891695.
  2. Sivakumar, B. "Disabled population up by 22.4% in 2001-11". Times of India. Retrieved 19 August 2018.
  3. Ghai, Anita (2002). "Disabled Women: An Excluded Agenda of Indian Feminism". Hypatia. 17 (3): 49–66. doi:10.1353/hyp.2002.0052. Retrieved 20 November 2015.
  4. Saikia, Nandita; Bora, Jayanta Kumar; Jasilionis, Domantas; Shkolnikov, Vladimir M. (2016). "Disability Divides in India: Evidence from the 2011 Census". PLOS One. 12 (2): e0172596. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172596. PMC 5310902. PMID 28199394.
  5. Human Development Unit (South Asia Region). "People with Disabilities in India: From Commitments to Outcomes" (PDF). World Bank. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  6. Kumar, S. G.; Das, A.; Shashi, J. S. (2008). "Epidemiology of Disability in a Rural Community in Karnataka". Indian Journal of Public Health. 52 (3): 125–129. PMID 19189833. Retrieved 12 February 2019.
  7. Kumar, S. Ganesh; et al. (2008). "Prevalence and pattern of mental disability using Indian disability evaluation assessment scale in a rural community of Karnataka". Indian Journal of Psychiatry. 50 (1): 21–23. doi:10.4103/0019-5545.39754. PMC 2745873. PMID 19771302.
  8. Singh, Amarjeet (2008). "Burden of Disability in a Chandigarh Village". Indian Journal of Community Medicine. 33 (2): 113–115. doi:10.4103/0970-0218.40880. PMC 2784616. PMID 19967036.
  9. Arora, Narendra K.; Nair, M. K. C.; Gulati, Sheffali; Deshmukh, Vaishali; Mohapatra, Archisman; Mishra, Devendra; et al. (2018). "Neurodevelopmental disorders in children aged 2–9 years: Population-based burden estimates across five regions in India". PLOS Medicine. 15 (7): e1002615. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1002615. PMC 6057634. PMID 30040859.
  10. "UN Treaty Collection: parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: List of parties". United Nations. 2012-03-21. Archived from the original on 2012-08-19. Retrieved 2015-11-20.
  11. "Fact Check: What Has the Govt Done for Persons With Disabilities?". The Quint. Retrieved 2018-10-31.
  12. Narayan, Choudhary Laxmi; John, Thomas (2017). "The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016: Does it address the needs of the persons with mental illness and their families". Indian Journal of Psychiatry. 59 (1): 17–20. doi:10.4103/psychiatry.IndianJPsychiatry_75_17. PMC 5419007. PMID 28529356.
  13. Friedner, Michele; Ghosh, Nandini; Palaniappan, Deepa (2018). ""Cross-Disability" in India?: On the limits of Disability as a Category and the Work of Negotiating Impairments". South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal. doi:10.4000/samaj.4516.
  14. Duffy, Richard M.; Kelly, Brendan D. (2019). "India's Mental Healthcare Act, 2017: Content, context, controversy". International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. 62 (1): 169–178. doi:10.1016/j.ijlp.2018.08.002. PMID 30122262.
  15. Morgan, Sumathi (2018). "Country Report - India". Asia-Pacific Journal of Intellectual Disabilities. 4 (1): 72–78.
  16. "Our cities cannot be smart, until they are accessible for everybody". hindustantimes.com/. 2018-10-23. Retrieved 2018-10-31.
  17. Pioneer, The. "What's the correct word? A little sensitivity goes a long way!". The Pioneer. Retrieved 2018-10-31.
  18. "PM uses 'divyang' for the disabled, upsets activists". Times of India.
  19. "Please don't call us divyang, disability rights community tells PM". The Hindu.
  20. Malhotra, Nipun (13 June 2019). "First person: Why I don't want to be called 'differently abled'". Scroll.on. Retrieved 18 May 2020.
  21. Kumar, S. Ganesh; Roy, Gautam; Kar, Sekhar (2012). "Disability and Rehabilitation Services in India: Issues and Challenges". Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care. 1 (1): 69–73. doi:10.4103/2249-4863.94458. PMC 3893941. PMID 24479007.
  22. Mohapatra, Atanu (Dec 2012). "Portrayal of Disability in Hindi Cinema: A Study of Emerging Trends of Differently-Abled" (PDF). Asian Journal of Multidimensional Research. 1 (7). Retrieved 20 November 2015.
  23. India at the Paralympics on paralympic.org

Further reading
  • Ghai, Anita (2015). Rethinking Disability in India. New Delhi: Routledge India. ISBN 978-0815373216.
  • Ghosh, Nandini, ed. (2016). Interrogating Disability in India: Theory and Practice. New Delhi: Springer India. ISBN 978-81-322-3593-4.
  • Mehrotra, Nilika, ed. (2020). Disability Studies in India: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore. ISBN 978-981-15-2615-2.
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