Educating Disabled Children - Education of Disabled Children in India © 2010
Educating Disabled Children - Education of
Disabled Children in India
Written by: Autism Advisor
Educating Disabled Children
India has some forty to eighty million people living with disability; among them thirty
percent of them are children below the age of fourteen years. In Indian ninety per cent of
disabled children do not get any form of schooling. There are number of families which are
living below the poverty and many families have to make choices about which of their kids
they can afford to send to school. Parents of disabled children have more difficult choices, as
they also have the burden of medical treatment, and others.
No population-based study has been conducted at the national level to supply genuine data on
the prevalence and incidence of disability in India. Therefore we must rely on the projections
made by trial surveys. According to an estimation population with disability in India is about
over 90 million, of these twelve million are blind, twenty nine million are with low vision,
twelve million are with speech and hearing defects, six million orthopedically handicapped,
twenty four million mentally retarded, eight million mentally ill.
In a separate survey of children (age 0-14 years) with delayed mental growth, it was found
that twenty nine out of a thousand children in the rural areas had developmental delays,
which are usually linked with mental retardation. The government has no record of the
number of disabled students in schools but according to activists the number of children of
school-going age who suffer from disabilities may be more than twenty million. Educating
Disabled Children
To make the education system more effective, government has promised to include disabled
children in all its educational programs, including the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the
Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).
Today there are more than three thousand special schools in India; nine hundr