I have worked in India and in Indian organisations abroad for a large part of my professional career. However when I think back I cannot recall more than 2 physically disabled colleagues during that entire time. Mind you, I am a sociable kind of person so my visual – and conversational – range extended beyond my own team, department and floor.
If you work in an average corporate environment, and if you were to conduct a similar exercise in recall and in observation, you will probably come up with a similarly small number.
Does this mean disability of all kinds have been eradicated in India? Clearly not, because at every traffic light stop, we have all experienced a mix of feelings at averting our gazes from disabled kids dragging themselves perilously between cars to make a few paise. But for the sake of this post, let’s narrow our focus again, just as we avert our gaze from those disabled begging kids.
But before we move forward, here is a working definition of disability which I will draw upon for this post:
“A disability is a condition or function judged to be significantly impaired relative to the usual standard of an individual or their group. The term is often used to refer to individual functioning, including physical impairment, sensory impairment, cognitive impairment, intellectual impairment or mental health issue. This usage is associated with a medical model of disability. By contrast, a human rights or social model focuses on functioning as an interaction between a person and their environment, highlighting the role of a society in labelling, causing or maintaining disability within that society, including through attitudes or accessibility favouring the majority. Disabilities may come to people during their life or people may be born disabled.”
Even though it is hard to find reliable statistics on disability in India, most smart people can see that both the commonly cited estimates – 18.5M disabled people according to the Disability Survey of National Sample Survey 2002 and 21.9M disabled people according to the Population Census 2001 – are rubbish.
For starters, the 2% figure is way off the numbers from other developed nations worldwide. In the UK for instance, nearly 15% of the population self-declares disability. About 18% of the population in the US is estimated to have some form of disability. With these comparators, it is evident that poor data collection rather than real low incidence of disability makes for this low 2% figure.
Further if we take a random piece from data about mental health in India, nearly 4M people in India suffer from schizophrenia, which implies that some 14-17M account for all other disabilities! A headline number of 18-21M is quite easily misleading and an age-based breakdown is even less reliable.
Back to the workplace then. Despite a raft of legislation aiming to protect access – including a National Policy for Persons with Disabilities dating back to 1993 – the participation of disabled people in the workplace remains poor. Even if we were to run, for argument’s sake, with this 2% figure, only an estimated 34% of that are in any kind of employment, excluding almost 2/3 of our disabled population. In this matter, India has plenty of company amongst the developed nations though the percentage of disabled people excluded may not be so large. But that is hardly something to be proud of.
What does it take to make a workplace embrace disabled colleagues, assuming all hygiene factors of work related skills and education are in place?
I think there is a threefold approach which can guide and shape our strategies to be inclusive of our disabled population. The shorthand is APT:
A: Awareness and Attitude
P: Policy and Process
I believe awareness would shape attitudes, and this remains the toughest mountain to climb in this area.
Here is an exercise for you. What is the first visual that pops up in your head when you hear the word ‘disability’?
If you said ‘a wheelchair’, congratulations, because in my series of awkward social experiments, to which my friends and family are often subjected, this has been a consistent find and you fit in the middle in the bell curve.
The truth is that mobility impairment is only a very small percentage of disability. Visual, auditory and speech impairments, mental health issues about which I have written before, and multiple disabilities make up the lion’s share of disabilities.
Disability is not just something one is born with; disability can come with age, life circumstance and from social attitudes towards not enabling access and inclusion. Being aware that disability can manifest in many ways can influence policy and shape processes. For instance, when we advertise open positions, do we signal our desire to hire from a cross-section of society? Do we even declare such intent through, say, a disclaimer at the bottom of the adverts? When we have candidates to interview, do we make them welcome especially if they have special needs such as access to the buildings, use of a special screen etc? Do we have disabled employees on board and do we take their feedback on continually improving our workplace not just at the work station, but in our facilities, our buildings and our environment?
The steps that corporate firms can take need not be limited to policy and process. Assistive (including adaptive and rehabilitative) technologies are here, well, to assist those with impairments of vision, hearing, speech, and mobility. Many NGOs worldwide work to fund the development and to accelerate the adoption of such technologies. Many firms too work in this very profitable niche. What is needed is the vision and the leadership in an organisation to deploy these technologies actively to enable and empower disabled colleagues.
Even as I say this, I am aware that discrimination and exclusion of disabled individuals starts much earlier in life, in primary education and sometimes, at home. Besides disability is not by birth alone and it could happen to any of us! All non-disabled people, who are leaders and managers of today and tomorrow, need to consider this issue.
Creating clear awareness and the right attitude, and ensuring it percolates down in society, is something that can start in the workplace. After all, we all go home from work and new thoughts and positive ideas can be contagious. May be it will catch on?
What do you think?
Disability India: http://www.disabilityindia.org/