Education for specially-abled at crossroads

MANGALORE: With most specially-abled children being denied admissions and a handful among them clearing the Secondary School Leaving Certificate examinations, Sarva Shikshana Abhayana’s (SSA) decade-old Inclusive Education for the Disabled (IED)is at the crossroads.A 34-page document submitted by the  Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities K V Rajanna to Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda revealed that the Department of Women and Child Development and the Department for Empowerment of Differently-Abled and Senior Citizens should be blamed for taking less interest in the IED and the differently-abled children not receiving the benefits of the money spent.These departments did not envisage a comprehensive inclusion policy (pending since 2005) to take care of around 1.5 lakh students with special needs. Eight government-run special schools and nearly 80 per cent of the private special schools across the state are in a pathetic condition.The document also showed that the syllabi for the special children were not updated. Due to lack of awareness, complaints of not allotting additional time for the differently-abled during examinations, attaching green stickers on answer scripts, denial of admission to BEd and DEd courses continue to flood the office of the commissioner.A district rehabilitation centre set up in Mysore in 1983 was shut down in 2006 as the Centre withdrew funds. The document stated that if the state had continued to operate the Mysore centre, then the differently-abled persons could have    got the best services and accessed quality tools under the SSA.Owing to the state’s failure to fill the backlog posts through special recruitment drive, only around 6,000 differently-abled persons are in government service as compared to 30,000-35,000 differently-abled government employees working in the neighbouring states.