Counted Out

On 30 March, students at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, in Allahabad, found the body of Rahul Chaitanya Madala, a Deaf student from Telangana, in the hostel premises. Rahul had barely completed a year at the premier institute when he died by suicide. In the absence of sign language interpreters, it had been an impossible academic semester. Rahul had been failing several subjects—unsurprising, since he was effectively locked out of his education by an apathetic administration. Even after his suicide, IIIT-Allahabad preferred to put the situation in innocuous terms, stating that he had been “suffering from depression due to academic pressure.”

According to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, educational institutions are required to provide sign language interpreters and other support measures to enable students with disabilities to access learning. There is no comprehensive database tracking how many public-funded institutions have complied with these requirements. It does not help that Indian Sign Language is not officially recognised or included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. If granted official status, the use of ISL could be mandated and its presence established across various public institutions and services. Despite years of advocacy by the Deaf community, however, the Delhi High Court dismissed a PIL to include the ISL in the Eighth Schedule, in 2019. The court stated that “there are adequate provisions” under the RPWD Act, “to recognize, preserve and promote” the use of ISL.

India’s track record of counting persons with disabilities is chequered. “It is unfortunate how it never occurred to independent India to count the disabled until 2001,” Javed Abidi—a disability rights activist, often referred to as the father of the Indian disability movement—told The Hindu in 2010. Although parliament enacted the country’s first disability law in 1995, with merely seven disabilities listed, it took activists another half decade to push for the comprehensive inclusion of disability as a category in the 2001 census. While the 1991 census had no questions on disability, the 2001 census collected data on five types of disabilities.

The 2011 census—the last decennial census to be held, 14 years ago now—collected data on eight types of disabilities, and put the number of persons with disabilities at 26.81 million, or 2.21 percent of India’s total population. Since the passage of the RPWD Act in 2016, the number of disabilities recognised has increased to 21. But with the Narendra Modi government continuing to delay this decade’s count, there is no comprehensive, up-to-date record of persons with disabilities in the country. As it is, international organisations estimate the prevalence of disability to be around fifteen percent globally. According to the World Health Organization, the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community in India alone is estimated at around 63 million—nearly three times the Indian census figure for all persons with disabilities combined.