This is a story woven around the strength and endurance of 20 million Indian women, who are forced to live in complete subservience, dependent on their families, even hidden from society, so that they don’t damage the marriage prospects of their siblings. A story of young women who can’t go to regular schools, can’t marry and just can’t be NORMAL. Women who are made dependent right from the beginning. All because they are physically disabled.

Their options? Hardly any. Few schools admit the physically handicapped. And the ones that do, stall at making minor adjustments like keeping a particular classroom on the ground floor, rather than the first or second floor, so that the disabled students can access it easily. As a result, only three percent of the disabled go to school. Vocational rehabilitation centres set up by the government and non-government organisations (NGOs) do impart some training – generally in candle-making, tailoring, basket-weaving or making pickles and masalas. But is this kind of economic independence practical today?

Worse, most of these disabled women aren’t even aware that mobility aids can change their lifestyles and, indeed, their lives. And of the meagre one percent who avail the existing facilities, a majority refuse aids around the time they reach puberty. The reason: Getting calipers or other appliances made requires taking measurements that are often intimate in nature. And most of the technicians are male.

Then, there is the ADPI scheme (Assistance to Disabled Persons of India), which gives free mobility aid to people who belong to a lower income group. But schemes such as these lack follow-up facilities – if these free appliances don’t fit well, alterations are expensive. A logic-defying fact: 80 percent of the workshops which help the handicapped are in urban India, whereas more than 78 percent of them hail from rural India! Travelling to the city is expensive and accessibility to these aids, thus almost impossible for those from rural areas.

But there is hope. At last, there is someone who has realised the importance of making the handicapped economically independent if they are to be integrated into mainstream society. Chapal Khasnabis, executive director of Mobility India, an organisation that was set up in 1984, says that he sees no point in grooming the disabled to be future beggars. “We should try to train them in different skills, especially computers. Surely, they can be effective at designing and graphics,” he says.

A long-term responsibility had to be taken, and his train of thought took an exciting turn as he pondered: Why not get the disabled involved in something they really want to do and make a decent living?