Ravi Khandelwal is in the home stretch of his undergraduate education, but his final year is shaping up to be the most challenging yet.
Khandelwal is taking up a Bachelor’s degree in Air Travel from the Asia-Pacific Institute in Gujarat, one of India’s largest states by land area, lying along the country’s western coastline. For the vast majority of students across India, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended their education, forcing them to adapt to online and distant modes of learning — or drop out otherwise. But for the Gujarat native, the situation is even more difficult because he struggles with a learning disability.
His condition has always made school difficult for him, but Khandelwal is determined and had always strived to maneuver around it. Before the pandemic, for instance, he used to be able to easily clear his doubts about the lessons by asking his teachers or peers. But now that the classroom has been fragmented into screens and faulty Internet connections, he rarely has the opportunity to raise his clarifications.
The situation is no better for students with sensory disabilities, as well. Aseem Watts, 20, has a hearing disability and says that he, too, struggles with online education. His woes are compounded by connectivity problems, which only serve to magnify his handicap.
As a result, Watts is growing increasingly hopeless about the prospects of his schooling and, by extension, his career, especially under the fraught economic situation confronting India today. “I keep thinking about how to get a job,” he says, adding that several members of his family have already lost their jobs or endured pay cuts.
As COVID-19 dismantles the educational structure in India, Khandelwal and Watts have emerged as the norm rather than the exception nowadays. All across the country, students with disabilities are being crushed by the multiple burdens of surging coronavirus case counts, a bleak economy, and state leadership that seems uninterested in protecting their welfare.
Ravi Khandelwal is a year away from earning his Bachelor’s degree in Air Travel, but the pandemic has forced him to contend with the difficulties of online and distance learning — a situation only made worse by his learning disability. (Photo by Martand Jha).
Unrecognized minority
Disability in India has always been treated as taboo, an issue which seems to be of little interest to authorities and society, and educational institutions are no exception.
Most schools and universities in the country don’t even have the appropriate basic infrastructure for students with disabilities. Access ramps or lifts are rare or, when present, are inadequate to provide complete access to classrooms and lecture halls. Much more so are educational materials for these students, as well as particular technologies, tools, and equipment that could facilitate equitable learning.
So, when the pandemic hit, the transition to virtual learning was made without much consideration for students with disabilities.
Such was the complaint by Bhawana Passan, 25, who recently passed her 12th class examinations, which means that she’s now qualified to take up an undergraduate program. She had planned on pursuing a degree in Bachelor of Arts or Business Administration, but the pandemic forced her to forgo further education.
Like Watts, Passan also has a hearing disability, and the idea of taking up university-level classes online unnerves her. She says that the absence of a physical classroom environment severely disrupts the learning process for her and takes away the support that she would otherwise get from her friends and classmates.
Most universities also don’t employ sign-language experts, making distance learning futile for students with disabilities. For Passan, Watts, and others, virtual classes simply carry no meaning or value, as it becomes physically impossible to even comprehend a word of what is being taught.
“In the COVID-19 crisis, students with disabilities are one of the worst-affected communities,” says Raam Singh, who has recently finished his post-graduate studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and is currently pursuing a PhD program.
Singh has visual impairment and comes from a socio-economically underprivileged background. When the lockdown was first enforced, he found himself completely locked out of his education. Because of his disability, he typically relied on scribes to accomplish answer sheets on his behalf, but with the strict movement restrictions, Singh had no way to find a scribe.
To make matters worse, Singh lives with a big, joint family in one of the villages outside Delhi, where internet connectivity is poor and power cuts are frequent. For quite some time, he was unable to attend even a single online class, which pushed his final examination back by six months, almost an entire semester.
Despite all that he’s been through, Singh is still relatively lucky: Every month, his university gives him a minimal monthly stipend of Rs3,500 (approximately US$50) as a form of assistance, which he says is just enough — sometimes even falls short — to pay for his hostel and mess bills. The mere fact that Singh is a student already puts him ahead.
For his orthopedic disability that affects both of his legs, Dheerendra Kandav receives a pension of Rs1,500 (approximately US$20) every three months. Not only is this amount too low to help him make ends meet, it’s also usually delayed, forcing him to depend on his family for survival. (Photo by Martand Jha).
In India, the vast majority of children living with disabilities have dropped out of school or had never even entered the educational system to begin with. A 2019 UNESCO report found that there are nearly 8 million children with disabilities under the age of 19 in the country. A quarter of them do not attend any educational institution. Of all five-year-olds with disability, 75 percent are out of school.
Much of this bleak scenario could be traced back to the general view in the country that education is an investment that would allow children to eventually give back to their families. It makes sense, so the logic goes, to allot what limited resources they have to children without disabilities, instead of to children with disabilities.
Richa Bhutani, of the non-governmental organization Astha Foundation, which provides regular and skill-based education and therapy to students with disabilities, confirms that these macro-level concepts and statistics reflect unfortunate realities on the ground.
Through experience, Bhutani has learned that poverty is closely linked with disability. The majority of children with disabilities come from poor families, who, even in normal times, have very little to spare for their child’s schooling.
Amid COVID-19, when having two square meals a day is way beyond their reach, other needs like providing digital education to their children with disabilities are not even a thought, let alone a priority.
Invisibilized
Just like Singh, Dheerendra Kandav is a young person with disability, who, despite being from a poor family, has managed to earn an education for himself. He is currently a university student, trying to deal with the challenges of school amid the pandemic.
But unlike Singh, Kandav receives only Rs1,500 (around US$20) every three months from the government as disability pension. Not only is this much lower than what other students get, it’s also rarely given on time. In the last 18 months, Kandav says his pension has been disbursed only twice. He hasn’t received any aid at all yet this year.
When asked why his pension is so low, Kandav says that India apparently has no uniform rule by which these pensions are determined, and the exact values differ from state to state. The allowance set by Kandav’s home state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, will differ from those in Delhi. There is also no rule that compels educational institutions to provide aid to their students with disabilities, which is why not everyone is in Singh’s position.
Kandav’s case illustrates how the pandemic has provided the government, educational institutions, and the Indian society at large another excuse to continue to overlook people with disabilities, further pushing them toward the margins of public consciousness.
“These students still had the social capital to voice their concerns but millions of differently-abled children and people in general have been invisibilized from the public discourse,” says Anurag Kashyap, himself orthopedically challenged, and works for Sarthak Educational Trust, a Delhi-based non-profit that provides skill-based education to students with disabilities.
To others, however, the current crisis can instead be used as an opportunity to advance the rights of marginalized communities, and to ensure that there is ample and appropriate space for them in the new normal.
First, institutions should take advantage of the empty school grounds to make their facilities more friendly to students with disabilities, particularly by installing access ramps or lifts, and procuring educational materials and equipment that have been adapted for users with disabilities.
Educational establishments should also beef up their roster of personnel and employ more sign language experts, consultants, as well as counsellors, therapists, and psychologists to provide these students with the support they need.
The government could also establish a central commission for persons with disability, to act as a constitutional body and institutionalize their rights into India’s mainstream society and socio-political framework. This commission can also act as a medium between its constituents and the various government agencies and state authorities, helping to streamline efforts to make life easier for this sector of society.
But most importantly, the Indian society needs to wake up from its state of lethargy and finally pay attention to people with disabilities. Concerted efforts from the government, civil society, and the media could help teach the general populace about the plight of people with disabilities and counter the widespread stigma against them.
Recognizing their challenges and affording them the support they need will go a long way to help a community that has been rendered helpless by their condition, left out by society, and overlooked by the system.●
Martand Jha is a senior research fellow at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is also a freelance writer, and his work has been published in many national and international publications, including The Diplomat, The National Interest, and International Public Policy Review.
