Disability News and Advocacy in India

Awareness is rightly termed as the key means of turning people with disabilities into alive and aware proponents of disability rights movement. But the Indian media, which is seen as the most effective partner in spreading awareness in a developing nation, is clearly and largely unaware of disability issue and even when they come out with an odd story it borders on snobbery and patronising.

We see samples of this almost on a daily basis, let me site an example that recently sent my blood racing and heart pounding. Read this: “It is fairly commonplace for a group of trekking enthusiasts to spend vacations staking claim at the 12,500 meter summit. But this time those climbing the river crossing and the rope-grappling were an assorted bunch of handicapped between 10-76 years with disabilities ranging from blindness to lameness.” The news was carried on the wires of Press Trust of India (an Indian equivalent of AP or Reuters) to narrate a group of people with varying disabilities going on a trek. The description reminds me of what an alien encounter would be produced as, I mean literally, by the preson responsible for writing this testimony of insensitivity.

I do not want to moralise and say that people with disabilities be treated as the holy cow and need not be subjected to the same kind of poor writing which others are also face. But have you heard of people being described as “an assortment of varying intelligence level” or “an assortment of people with different types of gender”.