International Day Of Persons With Disabilities: Why You Should Know About It

As per the reports of World Health Organization, around 15% of the world population is disabled. Majority of persons with disability, ranging around 80%, are from developing countries.

Inclusivity, removal of stigma attached to the people affected with disability, and reducing the barriers of society is the demand of human right activist and international organization around the world.

Why Do We Need International Day of Persons with Disabilities:

• To promote, protect and defend the rights of person with disability.
• Every seventh person alive today – more than one billion people in total – live with some form of disability. Still, the rights of people with disabilities has constantly been ignored.
• One in every five women along with every tenth children suffer with disability of a kind.
• Their constant struggle in the societies for the access to education, employment, health care and resource allocation gets amplified when the government does not provide them with ample facilities
• The spread of COVID-19 brought along with it an additional scare to persons with disability as they had greater chance of contracting the virus along with severe symptoms and higher number of deaths.

What Is The Significance of The Day:

• To promote leadership and participation of persons with disability for an inclusive, accessible and sustainable world- Theme of 2021.
• To promote the equal participation of persons with disability - Sustainable Development Goal 10
• To take necessary steps for the inclusion of persons with disabilities in all aspects of society and development.
• To address and minimize the attitudinal and environment barriers. Have you seen that most of the schools and colleges don’t have ramp for locomotion? This is environmental barrier for persons with disability. When the teachers and parents in school stare and give names to the child with disability, or a person is rejected for marriage proposal on account of disability, it is attitudinal barrier.
• United Nations Convention on Rights of Person with Disability(UNCRPD), focuses on building back better environment for the persons with disability.

India had ratified UNCRPD in 2007. It was only in 2016 that Rights of Persons with Disability Act was passed in the Indian Parliament giving them enforceable rights in the court of law. The new act has a basket of around 21 disabilities notified by the Central Government, which is huge compared to earlier inclusion of just seven disabilities.

The inequality has widened, depriving persons with disability of general resource and at same time exposed the society of tagging them with greater stigma and discrimination. There is the surging need to build back better post COVID world with participation of the society and persons with disability at large.

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