This start-up aims to be the bridge of information for children with special needs

In India, the disabled population constitute 2.21% of the total population, as per the 2011 census

Interestingly there is no one static condition of disability. A disability is a result of the interaction between a person with a health condition and a environmental context. "Individuals with similar health conditions may not be similarly disabled or share the same perception of their disability, depending on their environmental adaptations," according to a paper titled 'Disabled Persons in India: A statistical profile 2016'.

Children with disabilities mainly come under the purview of the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment. Some of the issues are, however, dealt with by the health ministry. “But no single ministry has been assigned the protection of these children, which leads to varying data about occurrence of disability amongst children,” says a report by Childline India, an NGO that works towards bettering lives of children.

As per Childline’s records, 1.67% of the 0-19 population has a disability. 35.29% of all people living with disabilities are children. “Other estimates say that India has 12 million children living with disabilities. Only 1% of children with disabilities have access to school and one third of most disabilities are preventable. Under-nutrition is a severe problem with children who suffer from cerebral palsy. In India 80% of children with disabilities will not survive past age 40,” says the report.

Currently, educational boards - particularly ICSE and CBSE - have made it mandatory for schools to have a special needs instructor and counsellor. Reports, however, suggest that schools that aren't inclusive of children with special needs have found a loophole and hire one counsellor/special needs teacher for schools that can have up to 3,000 students. This, the reports suggest, are just to abide by the rules laid down by the boards.

According to Arjun Sawhney, founder and CEO of iRockit, a start-up focusing on educating schools on inclusion and working with parents of children with special needs, 15% of the paediatric population have some special need. “A large percentage of these children have conditions like dyslexia, ADHD and mental illnesses which go undetected because they require a trained eye to diagnose, as there may be no obvious signs. Also, the law mandates that a child cannot be held back up to Class VIII, so every child including special children, get automatically promoted to Class IX. While this is great in a way as it lends to social development with the same age group, in the absence of appropriate special education, the child’s academic level may be of a child a few classes lower. In several such cases, the child has no option but to drop out of the regular school system thereafter" he says.

Sawhney explains that every child with a special need may not have a disability necessarily. Citing an example of children with hearing impairment, he says that a child is said to have a hearing disability if s/he has a specified level of impairment as defined by the law. However, several children may have milder hearing impairments which don’t meet the disability threshold, but still require some intervention educationally and medically. Often such undetected children are termed as distracted in school and are placed at the back of the class, which only worsens the problem further as the instruction by the teacher gets even less audible, he explains.

Explaining the role of iRockit, Sawhney says that the platform intends to be a one-stop shop for curated information and products and services required by schools and parents to help children with special needs. “Training teachers to be inclusive is important, but before that we need to get the school managements to adopt to philosophy of inclusion," he says.

While the website is currently up, it will take three months to become a hub of products and services for special children.

One of the biggest reasons schools are not inclusive of children with special needs is that in today's day and age, everything is result oriented. Reeta Jena of the Centre for Autism Therapy, Counselling and Help (CATCH) corroborates this. Jena, who has been running the centre in Bhubaneswar for the past 13 years, says the biggest challenge she faces is convincing parents to ensure their children with special needs are taken care of. "Sometimes parents feel that they are spending too much on an autistic child, and add that the government should be more proactive about this. But this is a topic that can be debated for years," she says.

While the Centre is taking the right steps in ensuring that children with special needs are not discriminated, it is also time for the authorities to be more vocal about how they are distributing funds to improve quality of education, and sensitising society to ensure more inclusion.