Analogous to the so-called 3 R's of learning, I'd like to propose three E's for emancipation of a group of people who have been denied rights that others assume are `entitlements' of all people: education, employment, and entertainment. Before elaborating on the state of access of these Three E's to the PwD of India, let me begin by recalling that Section 1 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability (UNCRPD) states that the purpose of the Bill is to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity.
Education:
A professor of mathematics famed for his pithy pronouncements like `a picture is worth a thousand words' once said that `a measure of the civilisation of a country is the cleanliness of its toilets'. By his metric, the state of our civilisation is somewhere between non-existent and repulsively barbaric. Most children who have the privilege of attending schools (all of whose toilets are invariably dirty and stink), strain their will powers and bodies every school-day in order to not have to use the toilet all day till they return home. Imagine the plight of those whose bladders will not allow them this possibility (a not uncommon condition associated with various forms of disability). In a typical school in India, a child with locomotor problems will not have a wheelchair and will need to crawl to the toilet on a path that gets increasingly unclean - talk of `respect for one's inherent dignity’! And you can be sure that typical school will have no ramps or elevators, and several classrooms can be accessed only after negotiating one or more flights of stairs. And colleges might only be slightly better, if that! A friend of mine who taught at the `prestigious' IIT in Mumbai told me that during every class he taught in a certain course in a certain room one semester, he would see the same boy being carried up the steps by the same friend! (I must admiit that, recently, another friend in the math faculty there proudly told me that every classroom in their department could now be reached by an elevator!
Employment:
Most employers would instinctively consider somebody with a discernible disability like cerebral palsy or Down Syndrome to be unsuitable as a prospective employee. At the other extreme, there are organisations like Cafe Coffee Day and Lemon Tree Hotels which predominantly hire people with a hearing impediment and Down Syndrome respectively. While the latter practise is laudable CSR, that is the kind of thinking that promotes special schools for people with specific disabilities, whereas all schools (establishments) in an ideal world would be non-discriminating and fully inclusive. Are there special schools for left-handed people or people who wear glasses? This is not to say there should not be concessions for people with special needs like ramps and elevators or reserved parking lots for vehicles of people with special needs. But such concessions will not work in an unthinking society such as ours, where it is the rule rather than the exception for an inconsiderate populace to park vehicles in a manner that blocks access for a wheelchair to a ramp or park without batting an eyelid in a slot reserved for disabled people even when everybody in the car is completely able. Our Govt. tables a law whereby a percentage of jobs are reserved for specially abled but subject to peculiar criteria: for instance, a telephone operator’s job could be your’s provided you had only one leg or arm AND the job had not been given to so many such people as to have exhausted that quota. The first step to inclusivity is to embrace diversity as a virtue rather than regard PwD as freaks!
Entertainment:
Surely, going to a play, movie, concert or a visit to the beach or going for a swim would all in qualify as enjoyment of one’s human right and fundamental freedom, but all these forms of diversion are denied to one who is constrained to a wheelchair. For another example, take dining out. More or less the only accessible restaurants are in five-star hotels, and those blow a big hole in your pocket. The same thing holds for `having a beer with the gang after a lecture’ (an integral part of academic life in many western countries). The web-sites of stand alone restaurants are delightfully uninformative about their state of accessibility. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Zomato took the trouble to state that some restaurants are wheelchair accessible - until I found that the only path to one such restaurant had two six inch steps. So, like the rest of India, `only a few steps' also qualifies as accessible for Zomato!
