| Educating Disabled Children | | | | delayed mental growth, it was found that twenty nine |
| India has some forty to eighty million people living with | | | | out of a thousand children in the rural areas had |
| disability; among them thirty percent of them are | | | | developmental delays, which are usually linked with |
| children below the age of fourteen years. In Indian | | | | mental retardation. The government has no record of |
| ninety per cent of disabled children do not get any | | | | the number of disabled students in schools but |
| form of schooling. There are number of families which | | | | according to activists the number of children of |
| are living below the poverty and many families have to | | | | school-going age who suffer from disabilities may be |
| make choices about which of their kids they can | | | | more than twenty million. Educating Disabled Children |
| afford to send to school. Parents of disabled children | | | | To make the education system more effective, |
| have more difficult choices, as they also have the | | | | government has promised to include disabled children in |
| burden of medical treatment, and others. | | | | all its educational programs, including the Sarva Shiksha |
| No population-based study has been conducted at the | | | | Abhiyan and the Integrated Child Development |
| national level to supply genuine data on the prevalence | | | | Scheme (ICDS). Today there are more than three |
| and incidence of disability in India. Therefore we must | | | | thousand special schools in India; nine hundred are |
| rely on the projections made by trial surveys. | | | | schools for the hearing impaired, four hundred for |
| According to an estimation population with disability in | | | | children with visual impairment, seven hundred for |
| India is about over 90 million, of these twelve million are | | | | those with locomotors disabilities, and one thousand for |
| blind, twenty nine million are with low vision, twelve | | | | the mentally disabled. Very few schools have |
| million are with speech and hearing defects, six million | | | | resource rooms and employ special education |
| orthopedically handicapped, twenty four million mentally | | | | teachers to help keep children with special needs in |
| retarded, eight million mentally ill. | | | | their system. Sadly, these amenities are found in very |
| In a separate survey of children (age 0-14 years) with | | | | few cities. |