22 November 2010
By Surbhi Khyati
Lucknow, India
OR the first time in India, people with multiple disability will be a part of Census 2011. The census will not only include the number of people in each disabled category but also recognise diseases like dyslexia and autism as forms of disability.
Disability, which was included in various census in different forms but discontinued in 1991, was reintroduced in 2001. However, Census 2001 was confined to disability in vision, speech, audio, movement and mental. Census 2011, however, will include people with two or more disabilities – speech and audio; vision and audio; impairments like movement will be combined with vision or audio or speech or others; mental retardation or illness with vision or audio or others; or difficulty in movement, speech, audio or loss of memory due to old age.
Along with recognising a person with multiple disorders, the enumerators will also mark the type of disabilities the person is facing.
"For the first time, multiple disability will be included in the Census, so that the exact number of the disabled can be counted," said Neena Sharma, Director of Census Operations in UP.
The Census will also recognise as disabled, people with diseases like autism, progeria, inherited bleeding disorders (thalassemia or haemophilia), epileptic seizures, specific learning disabilities (dyslexia).
However, these disabilities will be included in the "any other" category in the census and details of the diseases will not be enumerated.
The training of 117 master trainer facilitators in the state, who will question people on disability, will begin from the first week of December.
These facilitators will in turn train around 9,000 master trainers, who will further train 35,0000 enumerators, said Sharma.
According to Census 2001, the total number of disabled people in India was 2.1 per cent of the total population. However, as per UN figures, around 10 per cent of the Indian population was disabled. "There is a huge gap between the two datas, which means that a large number of the disabled are yet to be counted," said Amresh Chandra, regional coordinator of Sense International – an NGO working on multiple disability.
Along with recognising a person with multiple disorders, the enumerators will also mark the type of disabilities the person is facing
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