A just society for the disabled

 Picture for representational purposes only. 

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Globally, one in every 10 persons is disabled. Which means that in our world, 500-650 million people are disabled. By 2015, this figure is expected to rise to around 800 million, making people with disabilities the world’s largest minority group.

 

The disabled experience life through many obstacles — physical, social and emotional. Often they are ignored, pitied, patronised, objectified and even fetishised.

 

Societies respond to people with impairments differently. In the past, the most common model was the charitable one where the disabled were recipients of pity and largesse. In recent decades, there has been a global shift to defining disability as a human rights subject.

 

As such, one can choose to see disability as an individualised medical condition needing a medical solution. In this paradigm, appropriate assistance is understood either as rehabilitation efforts to enable the individual to overcome the effects of the disability, or medical efforts to find a cure.

 

Juxtaposed with this is the social model under which disability is redefined as a social construct, a type of multi-faceted societal oppression.

 

Here being “disabled” depends upon the deviation from society’s construction of corporeal normality. 

 

Both models are incomplete in themselves. The medical model considers clinical measuring, questioning, numbering and classifying to be the only yardsticks of disability. 

 

However, this excludes the functions aspired to by the individual. It is alienating rather than supportive. 

 

The social model has also been criticised, including by the disabled community, for not taking into account the physical body in its analysis of disabling factors. It has been depicted as too unbending in its concentration on structural societal factors and as “disregarding the cultural and experiential aspects” of a disabled person.

 

The social model fails to recognise the physical and emotional problems that are associated with impairment, disabling factors regardless of societal responses. Still, the social model perspective, with its separation of impairment and disability, has yielded many political benefits and been a starting point for research, activism and discussion.

 

The World Health Organisation’s International Classifica­tion of Functio­ning, Disability and Health (ICF) defines disability as an umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations and participation restrictions. 

 

ICF believes disability is always an interaction between features of the person and features of the overall context in which the person lives. Some aspects of disability are almost entirely internal to the person, while other aspects are almost entirely external. In other words, both medical and social responses are appropriate; we cannot wholly reject either kind of intervention. 

 

What is urgently needed is the development of an integrated model that will empower people with disabilities, giving them full and equal rights alongside their fellow citizens. 

 

Disability studies can play a significant role in bridging the gap between the medical and social models of disabilities and building a functional and sustainable integrated model. 

 

But the scope of disability studies needs to be widened. Disability studies should be interdisciplinary in approach and should include the medical fraternity, social sector specialists, psychologists, economists, business and spiritual leaders, educationists and many others too.

 

In India, one of the major achievements of the disabled rights community was to incorporate the essence of the United Nations General Assembly passed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disab­ilities (UNCRPD) in the planning process of the country. 

 

India’s Eleventh  Five-Year Plan (2007-12) recognised that to achieve due justice, the disabled need the attention of several ministries and departments. For example, the ministry of rural development has provided three per cent reservation for disabled people in its welfare schemes.

 

However, much more needs to be done. For instance, while school enrolment of children with disabilities has risen, do we know whether students are inte­gr­ated into the classroom and school environment?

 

These are the issues we need to ponder as we work towards a just society for the disabled, one where equity and justice are available to those who are already at a disadvantage.

 

- The writer is a noted public health specialist and currently adviser on international health at the ministry of health and family welfare.

 

 

Source : Deccan Chronicle , 22nd July 2013