| India has some forty to eighty million people living with | | | | out of a thousand children in the rural areas had |
| disability; among them thirty percent of them are | | | | developmental delays, which are usually linked with |
| children below the age of fourteen years. In Indian | | | | mental retardation. The government has no record of |
| ninety per cent of disabled children do not get any | | | | the number of disabled students in schools but |
| form of schooling. There are number of families which | | | | according to activists the number of children of |
| are living below the poverty and many families have to | | | | school-going age who suffer from disabilities may be |
| make choices about which of their kids they can | | | | more than twenty million. |
| afford to send to school. Parents of disabled children | | | | To make the education system more effective, |
| have more difficult choices, as they also have the | | | | government has promised to include disabled children in |
| burden of medical treatment, and others. | | | | all its educational programs, including the Sarva Shiksha |
| No population-based study has been conducted at the | | | | Abhiyan and the Integrated Child Development |
| national level to supply genuine data on the prevalence | | | | Scheme (ICDS). |
| and incidence of disability in India. Therefore we must | | | | Today there are more than three thousand special |
| rely on the projections made by trial surveys. | | | | schools in India; nine hundred are schools for the |
| According to an estimation population with disability in | | | | hearing impaired, four hundred for children with visual |
| India is about over 90 million, of these twelve million are | | | | impairment, seven hundred for those with locomotors |
| blind, twenty nine million are with low vision, twelve | | | | disabilities, and one thousand for the mentally disabled. |
| million are with speech and hearing defects, six million | | | | Very few schools have resource rooms and employ |
| orthopedically handicapped, twenty four million mentally | | | | special education teachers to help keep children with |
| retarded, eight million mentally ill. | | | | special needs in their system. Sadly, these amenities |
| In a separate survey of children (age 0-14 years) with | | | | are found in very few cities. |
| delayed mental growth, it was found that twenty nine | | | | |