Combat disability by making disabled feel wanted

Eight times higher disability was noted in the agegroup above 55 years when compared to those in the age-group 18-45 years according to a four-year study carried out in Prakasham district by the Institute of Preventive Medicine.

The study brought out the fact that the actual rate of disability in 23 villages surveyed was 10.4 per cent in 2014 and came down to only 9.3 per cent in 2017 due to the various intervention programmes.

This data is being evaluated carefully as it gives the actual picture at the ground where disability was calculated in terms of visual, hearing, mobility, functional, psychological and motor skills in the individual. The survey was taken up to study disability in adults above 18 years of age. The survey is important as the National Sample Survey Organisation results of 2002 have shown disability at 1.8 per cent in all age groups in rural and urban India. But the World Health Survey 2004 shows it at 24.9 per cent and the World Bank and Disability in South Asia Review of 2003 puts the prevalence rate at 8 to 10 per cent.

The findings of 10 per cent in Prakasham confirm the existing prevalence and will be taken as a yardstick for other sample surveys in urban and rural India.

It was found that loss of mobility due to accident, trauma, diabetes, stroke, and other chronic ailments showed a prevalence of 4.7 per cent in 2014 and 4.5 per cent in 2017. Dr Sailaja Tetali, Director at IIPH explained “We found that disabled men who were single, not educated, without work and poor were much higher in number than females. But when we looked at the psychological distress in both genders, we found it to be more or less the same. In our survey, the major point that they mentioned was that they felt that society didn’t want them.”

The study was critical of the fact that by merely creating awareness about the disabled was not enough and it was important to make them feel wanted and required by the society.

THE SURVEY has shown a clear association between disability and increasing age, unemployment and socio-economic status whereby they are pushed into poverty.