For Persons with Disabilities, things are looking up, but...

Sonai Muthu (left) and Saswat Swain at the Annual Disability Matters Asia Pacific Conference in Bengaluru on Friday. Special Arrangement

He thought the availability of an elevator was a sign of accessibility when he first started working. His school and engineering college days had seen his father carrying him up the fleet of stairs. The concept of accessibility, and of a general readiness to employ Persons with Disabilities (PwDs), has come a long way since, said Saswat Swain, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, a disorder characterised by fragile bones.

Now Assistant Manager at Accenture, Mr. Swain has seen infrastructure and attitudes evolve in his decade-long career. “I never saw anyone on a wheelchair in offices. Around five years ago, I came across an employee on a wheelchair in the U.S. Since then, I have started seeing more even in India,” he said, indicating the slow but growing number of PwDs making it in white-collar jobs.

Infrastructure matters

Sonai Muthu, Assistant Manager from Accenture, and an Indian Institute of Technology graduate, made the shift to IT after his job in the manufacturing industry made him re-think the decision, pushing him into getting an MTech.

“It involved a lot of moving around and the environment was not very disabled-friendly. It is not even now,” said the 36-year-old, who has partial paraplegia.

While both agreed that things were beginning to look up on the work front in certain sectors, they elaborated on how it was not enough. A simple example, they said, was how disabled-unfriendly India’s public transport was, which had seats reserved for PwDs but little provision to help them get into a bus.

Need for role models

Insecurity on part of the PwDs was also a factor at play preventing more of them from taking the leap, they said, also underlining the need for role models. “Those of us who have made it should go back and inspire others too,” said Mr. Muthu.