The highest rates of disability are amongst those who are vision-impaired, and those who have problems to do with movement
Nirmita Narasimhan remembers the census takers coming to her home. They didn’t ask her question number nine. It was about disability. They said that it makes people uncomfortable.
Narasimhan is a policy director who works on disability issues at The Centre for Internet and Society, an NGO. She insisted that they ask questions on disability. Later, she found out that others too had a similar experience. Those conducting the census often skip the question. Sometimes families are reluctant to talk about it too.
The result is that India has far lower reported instances of disability than most other places in the world. This also means that policy action is effectively running blind, unsure of the scale of the disability issues in the country or its specifics.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) in a report in 2011 estimated that 15.3% of the world’s population deals with disability of one kind or the other. The 2011 census puts India’s disabled at 2.21% of the population.
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