Dear All
ABSTRACT
The Training and Rehabilitation for the children with “Disability” has started as “Charity” and transformed into “Equality and Right”. The Government is working with Non - Governmental Organizations (NGOs) hand in hand for an effective implementation of the policies and planned programmes. Though several organizations are working effectively still based on the recent reports it is understood that till today the services could reach only 5-7% of the disabled leaving a mammoth task of 93-95% un-reached. This un-reached figure puts both Government and NGOs in alarming situation to search more and more innovative approaches in reaching the un-reached disabled individuals. In spite of forming more and more NGOs, still the gap between reached and un-reached could not be minimized significantly. This may be due to the fact that most of the NGOs are concentrating on the Institutional Rehabilitation which is more effective but at the same time it limits the number of beneficiaries. This forces to look for an alternative to the Institutionalized Based Rehabilitation (IBR). The basic concept of non-institutionalized rehabilitation lies in mobilizing or sensitizing the parents or community to shoulder the responsibility of rehabilitating their people with disability in the community itself after getting the required training / orientation which is known as Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR).
In the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, the parents of the people with mental retardation with associated disabilities like: autism, cerebral palsy and multiple disabilities to rehabilitate their children along with several such children mostly living in the rural villages. In this direction in the first phase, patens were empowered themselves with professional qualifications and later established their own associations / organizations. Initially most of them were concentrated for the institutional based rehabilitation and later moved towards the community based rehabilitation with the aim of reaching more and more needy individuals and to get better answer for their unanswered question that “what will happen to our child after us?” with sustainability and quality of life. The impact of the CBR is significant and yielded better results with the acceptance of all the stakeholders at the community level by creating an integrated, inclusive and barrier free environment with better access for all the services / facilities at all the levels.
This paper presents the efforts of the parents’ in empowering themselves to serve their own people with disability along with such several individuals and relief to their parents and community. The service spectrum adopted by most of them is based on the issues, skills and needs of the individuals covering: prevention, early identification, early intervention, mainstreaming, special education, pre-vocational activities, vocational training, income generation programs, formation of self help groups with micro finance support, employment, participation in all the poverty alleviation programs etc. The efforts of these parents resulted significantly for some individuals to lead independent living with better participation as a productive member at levels in community based integrated, inclusive and barrier free environment.
In the state of Andhra Pradesh, 25 parents’ associations are exclusively working for the welfare of the people with mental retardation with other associated disabilities and their network is moving forward to orient more such associations to work with CBR as a rights based model for the empowerment of all these special people and thus to make them to lead independent living to the maximum extent possible in the given environment with better sustainability and quality of life on the basis of equality and dignity as a right like any other normal member of the community.
Looking forward....
Remarks: Paper presented at the Seminar
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