Earning a livelihood
2006
For disabled people to be fully integrated into national life, they must be able to earn a livelihood and live an independent life like any other citizen. This is a bit like stating the obvious.
There are, in fact, thousands of disabled people earning a livelihood in all sorts of ways - in low-skill as well as technical jobs, in decision-making positions, in the formal as well as the informal sector.
In India, though, their number is still very small. A report published by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in 2004 found that, between 1998 and 2000, special employment exchanges set up under the Persons with Disabilities Act could provide jobs to only 1% of those registered, annually.
The report noted that the government had failed to ensure the 3% reservation in poverty alleviation schemes to people with disabilities, as stipulated under the Act. State governments too were slow to identify positions in their establishments for persons with disabilities.
A matter of perception
Disabled people are not out of a job because their disability comes in the way of their functioning. It is social and practical barriers that prevent them from joining the workforce, such as lack of proper access to and around the workplace, lack of education, and the reluctance of employers to hire people with disabilities. As a result, many disabled people live in poverty and are often reduced to begging on the streets of cities. They are denied the right to make a useful contribution to their own lives and to the lives of their families and community.
The situation is worse in poor rural communities where employment is scarce for everyone. Government schemes for the disabled, whether in education or employment, rarely reach the people here. Yet, according to the 2001 census, 75% of the country’s 2.19 crore disabled people live in rural areas.
The families and communities of disabled people are also affected. According to United Nations estimates, at least 25% of any population is directly or indirectly affected by the presence of disability (UN Department for Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development, 1982).
Disability and poverty-reduction strategies
There is a two-way relationship between disability and poverty. Poor people are more likely to have a disability because of the conditions in which they live. And disability is likely to make people poorer because of limited opportunities and discrimination.
It is now being recognised that poverty reduction strategies must include mainstreaming people with disabilities. They should be able to get on buses, attend school, go to work, raise a family, access health and rehabilitation, and become members of political parties like every other citizen.
In June 2005, the PACS Programme held a first-ever meeting on issues related to livelihood promotion for people with disabilities, in New Delhi. PACS Programme Director Kiran Sharma described disability as one of the major causes and consequences of poverty. Twelve of the 107 PACS Programme poverty-related projects are on disability.
The panellists, who represented various organisations working with the disabled, emphasised the need to:
- create economic independence for persons with disabilities
- mainstream them into all walks of life
- design appropriate training programmes for them
- break physical and attitudinal barriers, and
- make the issue of employment for disabled people more visible.
Expanding employment opportunities
Employment is a key factor in the empowerment and inclusion of people with disabilities. They remain disproportionately undereducated, untrained, unemployed, underemployed and poor - especially women, the youth and people in rural areas.
Some may require specialised support services, assistive devices or job modifications, but these are all small investments compared to a lifetime of productivity and contribution.
Using technology:
Advances in technology can help disabled people in a number of ways. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Adaptive Technology Centre for the Blind (ATCB) introduced access to information for the blind community. The ATCB is involved in two main activities -- computer training supported with electronically generated voice, and computerised Braille production.
Electronically processed Braille transcriptions enable blind readers to access embossed books, textbooks and other documents. Graduates can therefore use computers with complete independence. Among the learners are visually impaired university students and civil servants.
Governments in developing countries, including India, are keen to supply schools with computers. The ATCB example has shown that blind schools should not be left out of this initiative.
Training employers:
In order to expand employment opportunities for disabled persons, employers have to be made aware of the potential of disabled people. A paper written for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggests a variety of ways in which this can be done:
- Train private sector management personnel to understand the needs of people with disabilities, and promote the inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce.
- Establish standards for accrediting organisations that provide services to increase the functional capacity of disabled persons.
- Create a database of employers and vocational rehabilitation programmes that employ and educate people with disabilities and their families. At the PACS Programme meeting in New Delhi, a representative from the disability NGO, National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP), said that just such a database of employable disabled people has been built up and shared with interested corporate houses.
- Conduct awareness-building workshops for employers to become familiar with the skills, knowledge and talents of people with disabilities.
- Conduct job fairs to introduce employers to the skills of people with disabilities and provide the latter with potential employment opportunities.
- Applications/advertisements for employment should state specifically that the agency is an equal opportunity employer of people with disabilities.
- Development agencies should implement pilot programmes for employing people with disabilities, to demonstrate the value of their inclusion.
- Employers’ federations and other related agencies should hire a job placement officer for people with disabilities.
It is important that people with disabilities and their organisations participate in and lead the design and implementation of vocational and supportive training, to ensure that such programmes are relevant, appropriate, and lead to secure employment.
Some efforts have been made in India to integrate disabled people into the workforce. Nav-Prerna is an organisation that trains and places people with disabilities. It works with around 50 industries in Noida and Gaziabad. At the PACS Programme meeting, its founder, Baldev Gulati, emphasised the need to orient and train supervisors to recruit persons with disabilities. He also stressed the importance of maintaining high standards of quality in products made by disabled people so that their contribution is viewed as valuable and not a matter of charity.
The two-wheeler giant Kinetic Engineering has set up a special ancillary unit to its main factory in Ahmednagar, in collaboration with the Pune District Leprosy Centre. Here, disabled people operate and maintain machines and observe strict quality standards.
The Karnataka branch of the National Association of the Blind (NAB) has opened a call centre for visually impaired people, in collaboration with Tata Infotech.
There are other examples, but they are still too few. There is no proper employment strategy in place even for the government sector, which is currently the biggest employer of disabled people.
Access and education
Physical access to the workplace from home, easy access within the workplace, and access to education are critically linked to the ability to earn a livelihood.
Despite legislation in India making it mandatory for all public buildings to be accessible to the disabled, hardly any have ramps or lifts that accommodate wheelchairs, signs in Braille, audio commands at traffic signals, or toilets that wheelchair-bound people can use. Buses and trains are virtually out of bounds for people in wheelchairs.
Research has proved that providing access facilities at the outset in any building adds no more than 1% to the overall cost. Moreover, such features make buildings and other public spaces safer for everyone, not just the disabled.
Delhi’s new underground Metro has incorporated barrier-free access from the start. It has ramps, wide elevators with wheelchair-level buttons, entry paths lined with tactile tiles to help the blind, accessible seating, audio announcements, handrails inside toilets, well-lit corridors for persons with visual impairments, and a ticket gate exclusively for disabled passengers.
In Vietnam, the Youth Disabled Association carried out a survey of public buildings and graded them according to how disabled-friendly they were. They explained to the managers of shops, restaurants, hotels, educational institutions, etc, how to make their premises more disabled-friendly. They showed them how modest and inexpensive the modifications could be. The campaign, which was telecast on TV and published in the print media, made an impact and highlighted the fact that disability issues were of interest to the public.
In rural areas, the disabled may be unable to even move out of their villages. A pilot project in a village in the Kandaketiya-Badulle district of Sri Lanka found that access to the village from the main road lay over a river with three rickety footbridges. The community, including the disabled, helped build a sturdy footbridge wide enough to take a wheelchair, with ramps at each end and handrails. Ramps were also built around the homes of the disabled, and access to toilets improved. Not just the disabled but also the elderly, pregnant women and children benefited from these changes.
Education and training equips disabled people with the skills necessary for employment. Though both are provided for under the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995, outside of the major cities few persons with disabilities have access to education or training.
The National Sample Survey 2004 found that 55% of the disabled in India are illiterate; only 9% have completed higher secondary education. Roughly 11% of disabled people in the age-group 5-18 years are enrolled in special schools in urban areas; in rural areas it is less than 1%.
In August 2004, the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People put out a report titled ‘Research Study on Present Education Scenario’. The report revealed that only 0.1% of disabled students were in mainstream educational institutions at the university level, and 0.51% at the school level.
In a comprehensive Action Plan for the Inclusive Education of Children and Youth with Disabilities, formulated by the human resources and development ministry and released in March 2005, the Indian government is committed to providing education through mainstream schools for children with disabilities. The plan also commits to providing the necessary teaching materials, provision of trained teachers, accessible physical infrastructure, provisions for disabled students from rural areas, a disability coordinator in universities, provision for home-based learning for those with severe multiple and intellectual disability, etc.
The target date for completing the scheme is a distant 2020. However, no interim step-by-step targets have been set, making it difficult to assess the scheme’s progress.
