The ‘special children’ trap

The 93rd Constitutional Amendment, which guarantees eight years of schooling to every child aged 6 to 14 years, is now a fundamental right. But the Amendment excludes 2-5-year-olds from this guarantee. Instead, the government and the Constitution have included early intervention for children under 6 years of age as a non-justiciable Directive Principle.

That the foundation of learning, intellectual and physical growth, and behavioural traits are formed during these very early years has been quietly ignored or callously set aside by the framers and funding partners of the Integrated Child Development Programme (ICDS). Touted as the world’s largest early child programme, ICDS operates under the mercurial mandate of a directive but not of an inalienable right. Even within this programme, as in the broader educational programme of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) or Education for All (EFA), the inclusion of the challenged child is neither attempted nor assured. If the challenged young are not actively encouraged to enrol in the ICDS centres, they are deprived of the supplementary nutrition, healthcare and early child education services offered there. The result is a massive exclusion from this child protection-development programme of 4-5 million challenged children under the age of five years, most of them from poverty stricken rural, urban and tribal areas.

This malady at the operational level is rooted in administrative neglect and a legacy of misperception at the policy level. The disabled are traditionally, and even now, viewed in compassionate but condescending terms as a concern of the Welfare Ministry, and not as the primary charge of the Education Department. While the legislation to give teeth to the 93rd Amendment, known as the Free and Compulsory Education for Children Bill 2003, in Article 10 does deal with children with disabilities, it takes a vague, non-committal stance on their inclusion in mainstream education. It leaves the decision on whether a challenged child should be in mainstream or special school to a Basic Education Authority. Thus it sidesteps the need for a clear articulation of the right of the challenged child to access the ‘normal’ school system and the mechanism for making such access possible. What those who work with the challenged youngsters are craving and proposing is the supplementation of the Bill with a provision that proposes a mechanism for the Authority to aggressively seek children with disability in its catchment area, identify their number and varied needs, and define the manner and mechanism with which they are to be assimilated within the regular school infrastructure, along with the necessary support system for such assimilation.

Post Independence, the Kothari Commission reiterated the inclusion principle in its own report and Plan of Action (1964). But the recommendation was never implemented. Through its National Policy on Education (NPE) and Plan of Action (POA) adopted in 1992, the Government of India continues to endorse the vision of ‘‘one special school at each district headquarters.’’ This vision per se is not unworthy. However, the number of special schools in relation to what is needed is abysmally low. A UNISED document (1999) notes there are about 3,000 special schools — 900 for the hearing, 400 for the visually, 1,000 for the mentally, and 700 for the physically impaired. The actual numbers may be more, as many schools run by NGOs are not captured in the above figures. Even so, their combined number cannot adequately serve the estimated 25 million challenged children under 18. Clearly the government has to move away from the special school culture towards inclusive schooling and also encourage, even require, private sector schools to do the same.

Author of The Burden of Girlhood — A Global Inquiry into the Status of Girls, Sohoni is a freelance writer and consults with UN agencies