Editorial | It’s our collective responsibility

Disability is apparently a physical handicap that we think is a hard luck by birth, or outcome of an accident. We pity such people, or if we are little decent we are sympathetic towards such people. Beyond this we never think about this problem. In out societies it is finally the person who faces it, and his immediate family that cares for him. If it goes any further it is the doctor that tries to treat the person, that too in a very strict medical regime.  None of us thinks that it is about the mindset, about how we think about this problem, and how we humanise our perspective on this. There is much that has changed in this regard. This change is intellectual, medical, societal and governmental. It is this deep shift in perspective that we have seen some significant legislations on this count. The societal understanding has also undergone a tectonic shift. Gone are the times when such people would be considered as unfortunate, and that was it. It means we couldn’t do anything about it. But as the sciences developed, new institutions of law and governance emerged, the concepts about disability started changing. Not only the tectonic shift in the medical technology that brought great ease to these people, the mind of the society, and the working of the state on such matters started changing.

Now it is a different thing to deal with disabled persons. They are no longer a burden, and the tag of misfortune is slowly falling off.  It is all because of a comprehensive change in the way we look at the problem now. But even after all this we are far behind the developed countries of the world in this regard. Our society, and government, haven’t done enough to integrate the differently-abled people in our systems. In our schools there are hardly any arrangements for these people. It should have been inbuilt in the system of our schools. Similarly our hospitals should be designed in such a way that the differently abled people don’t feel incapable of benefiting from the services in the hospitals. For any meaningful change in the lives of these people our collective thinking about the very idea of disability should change.

   

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