Disability in India and What You Can Do About It — Part 4: The Government
Audio transcription available here: https://soundcloud.com/user-442818167/disability-in-india-pt-4
Part 4: The government view of disability and the history of government action
From its birth in 1947 until today, the Indian government has pushed for a set of questionable policies that perpetuate a harmful view of disability
The original government view can be characterized by a general perception of disability rights as superfluous. From the first 5-year plan in 1951 until the 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act, the government saw its work towards helping and accommodating for the disabled community more as a form of charity than of a fight to establish necessary protections for the rights of disabled individuals. Money given to programs for disabled people was seen as extra spending, donations given by a benevolent government to a group of people with whom the government could not really be concerned with empowering or even defining. In fact, for much of the time between 1951 and 1995, disability was viewed as an impediment to work rather than a demographic category, such that it was outside of the purview of the welfare state intended to provide for the wellbeing of minorities and disadvantaged groups. While the government worked to secure the civil rights of women, members of the scheduled castes and tribes, and some minority groups, disability was lumped in with unemployment, old age, and sickness under an umbrella category for which the government promised the right to work.
In the early 1990s, after decades of reluctant, slow change, the Indian government was put under pressure by the early disability rights movement in India and the United Nations to adopt a uniform policy that would proclaim equality for and recognize the rights of the disabled community. This pressure resulted in the passage of the 1995 Persons with Disabilities Act, which was the first step in casting aside the “charity mindset” identified earlier in favor of a more modern, rights-based view of disability. The 1995 Act was the first official policy in India to explicitly recognize the rights of disabled individuals to equal educational, economic, societal, and cultural opportunities.
Unfortunately, despite the growth of the disability rights movement and some watershed moments after the mid-1990s, top-down reform from the government remains hampered by its treatment of disability almost entirely in medical terms rather than social or mental terms that encourage empowerment. The distinction between the medical model of disability and the social model of disability is one highly familiar to disability studies scholars: the medical model treats disability as a feature intrinsic to an individual, often physical, that is purely harmful in its existence and that must be treated. The social model of disability places less importance on the medical condition of disabled individuals and more on the societal structures that lead to the material realities for those disabled individuals, promoting a rights-based discourse in the process. The medical model of disability is now regarded by the disability studies community as actively harmful in its obfuscation of the role society plays in stigmatizing disability and disadvantaging neurodiverse individuals.
The 1995 Persons with Disability Act and the 2016 Persons with Disability Act both legitimized the medical model of disability, defining disability in medical terms by requiring professional medical confirmation of disabilities that are largely physical in nature. It is no overstatement to say that decades of weak, misguided government policy have at best hidden the disabled community from the public eye and at worst painted the community as a charity case for the most charitable members of society to uplift. In conjunction with several cultural factors, chief among them religion, government policy has created a society with a static, highly negative perception of disability.
