The healthcare industry in India has completely ignored people with disabilities and their specific needs.

I would go one step further to say that the healthcare industry has not just ignored people with disabilities, but that it actively discriminates against them! What we have today are hospitals that are inaccessible, staff that is unaware and untrained, and insurance that is simply denied.

I speak from experience. I am a wheelchair user. Not a single hospital in Delhi where I live and work has an accessible toilet. Everything from the reception desk to the payment counter to the doctor's examination table is out of reach. They are designed for healthy, fit people who just happen to be sick on a given day. The system, the infrastructure, completely exclude the disabled. They are oblivious to our needs.

Think of this — even the weighing scale is designed for people who can stand. So, when I go to see my doctor, how do I weigh myself being a wheelchair user? It is no rocket science. All you need is a weighing machine with a large enough platform and a ramp. All hospitals in the US and Europe have them, as do South Africa and Thailand, but not India.

Doctors are trained in break-fix kind of inputs. The staff is untrained in dealing with people with disabilities. The technology in healthcare is also inaccessible.

Health-related apps connecting doctors and medical services are not accessible, especially to the blind. Emergency services do not cater to either the deaf or the blind.

Another huge challenge is insurance. No retail healthcare policy in India covers congenital defects. I can say from experience that trying to get health insurance is so discriminatory that it is almost an exercise in humiliation.

More than the healthcare industry to blame is the apex Medical Council of India (MCI), which itself discriminates blatantly. Its so called rules are contradictory to what even the archaic Disability Act, 1995 prescribes.

The hearing impaired are not allowed to study medicine. The world over they can, and other countries boast of deaf nurses, deaf doctors, and even deaf surgeons. In the case of people with orthopaedic disabilities, the MCI only allows people with lower limb disabilities — that too, in the range of 50 to 70 per cent disability, whereas the Disability Act defines it as 40 per cent and more. So, if a person has 45 per cent or even 49 per cent disability, he is a person with disability in the eyes of the law, even before the Supreme Court but not for the MCI.

The bottomline is that healthcare in India is not yet ready to treat disability as something that can be a part of everyday life.

As a result, both the life span and the quality of life of disabled people are impacted and is generally poor.

The World Bank estimates that 15 per cent of the world’s population is affected by one disability or another. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014, currently pending with Parliament, increases the number of recognised disabilities to 21 from seven. With this, the official count will obviously rise and, by conservative estimates, that figure could be as high as 100 million. Surely such a large set cannot be ignored.

It is time our healthcare industry became more accessible, more inclusive. The Ministry of Health needs to take cognisance of this lacuna. One good beginning perhaps would be to open up the doors of this sector by employing people with disabilities, something we encourage and reward as a part of the NCPEDP (National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People) MindTree Hellen Keller Awards.

That should lead to more awareness and some sensitivity. And, yes, I would like to know my weight.

(The writer is Director of NCPEDP, and Global Chair of Disabled People International, a world body with special consultative status to the United Nations. The views are personal.)

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