The framing of policies by the Indian government to provide adequate facilities and equal opportunities to persons with disabilities for the next decade is now dependent on every Indian family’s willingness to acknowledge their existence during Census 2011.
He could be your 30-year-old son who hasn’t worked a day in his life and spends all his time at home, listening to the radio.
Perhaps your teenage sister rarely goes outdoors because it’s impossible for her to use public transport. Or maybe you’re wondering how you’ll manage to give your child a proper education without damaging his sense of self. For now, the best you can do to change their lives for the better is answer a simple question.
The framing of policies by the Indian government to provide adequate facilities and equal opportunities to persons with disabilities for the next decade is now dependent on every Indian family’s willingness to acknowledge their existence during Census 2011.
The figure of 2.1 million disabled people that was arrived at in Census 2001 was greatly at odds with the United Nations estimate of 10 million. This time around, the question of disability has been moved up in the list and widened to include multiple disability. The sensitisation of enumerators to the question of disability has also been undertaken in their training programmes.
However, many in the disability rights field fear that this isn’t enough to ensure that persons will disabilities will get counted in this census.
Trinayani, an advocacy group which works towards disability awareness and support, has launched a disability awareness campaign for Census 2011 consisting of radio spots, posters and a 30-second public service announcement. “If not the fear of stigma, just an ignorance of how important the Census is in effecting real change in people’s lives can cause respondents to not volunteer information about their disabled family members,” says Ritika Sahni, disability rights activist and founder of Trinayani.
“In the past ten years, policy makers have started attending to the disability issue. Once you start talking about it, it becomes an important subject and people start giving it attention. Disability awareness has certainly increased in the past decade but there is still a lot of road to cover,” adds Sahni.
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