Understanding the change in dissimilarity in participation and - PDF document

Understanding the change in dissimilarity in participation and inclusiveness in labour market for disabled in India 1 Srei Chanda, Research Scholar, International Institute for Population Sciences, India, email- srei1988@gmail.com Background: Inclusion is the basic agenda for the development of the deprived. The disabled in India shares more than 2% of Indian population which is oddly 27 million and its decadal growth rate is 20% (Census of India, 2011) (Awasthi et al., 2017). The worrisome increasing count shows severity of disease burden, poor urban development, demographic change and many other social conditions. With the fast changing socio-economic scenario of the country, the pace of inclusion of these population is dismal (Dawn, 2012). Disabled in India faces multiple deprivation, oppression and marginalization on several grounds (Elwan, 2011). The inclusive attitude of the market and society has not been clearly understood yet. The importance of that remains in the interest of India’s probl em of poverty and low employment generation, specially in the rural sector and socio-cultural ground. Though India has long been a signatory to different conventions like United Nations Conventions for Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) (2006) (Gurpur & Sekhar, 2017), and one of the few implementing country of various welfare schemes and policies for the person with disability since last two decades. It introduces the disability act named Person with Disabilities Act (PWD Act) as Equal opportunity, Protection of Rights and Full Participation in the year 1995, which is first among all the south Asian nations. Recently, the act is being modified to The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Acts (2016). Talking about the work opportunities, UNCRPD is equivocal about the reservation of the right for the disabled persons through article 27. Reservation of the disabled (locomotor, hearing, speech) is increased from 3% to 4% in the public sector recently after the new act implementation. It widens the chance of the persons with disabilities to safe guard themselves. It is utmost important to understand that health conditions or discrimination, which is to be measured for the study of disabled participation. Work participation is always lower in disabled population than the non-disabled (Sophie Mitra, Posarac, & Vick, 2013). In global market, India is known for its demographic window and untapped opportunity for human capital generation through its youth (Mitra & Nagarajan, 2017). However, the growth of young disabled, especially in the early working age groups, is a concern for inclusive development and capital generation. Burden of disability in the productive ages forces family to adapt alternative way through deprivation turn poverty or forces the members to work for 1

extra hours or out of stipulated productive ages. To address the severe development dilemma, it has become essential for government to make an effective measure more than renaming the disabled as “divya n ganj” . The disabled are prone to suffer from deprivation, inequality and poverty. The work loss reduces per capital consumption of the households (Raut, Pal, & Bharati, 2014). The sustainable development goals have set inclusion limit by the year 2030 for achieving full and productive employment with equal pay for equal work (United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals). The distance of achieving the target is far away for us, while persistent gap furrows deeply. The PWD Acts (1995) has certain loop holes regarding the authority for any development has given upon states. That misses restriction or corrective measure to be taken by any other authority (Naraharisetti & Castro, 2016) . That’s also investigates the step taken for the employment of the disabled. Gross perception of the volume of the disabled individuals is a vital question for the data and methods in research. Whom to include or not gives rise to the problem of comparability of data in several large-scale surveys or enumerations. Disability is attached with the social stigma, avoidance and negligence that sometimes become a cause of unrevealed identity (Shenoy, 2011). Gender, caste and space adds another dimension to explain the depth of deprivation and exclusion. This explains social model of disability over medical model. The idea of disability is more vivid with the inclusion of biopsychosocial model by International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) (Ustün, Chatterji, Kostansjek, & Bickenbach, 2003). Encountering all those recognition of actual disabled and determining the eligibility is an important task. The manipulation of the disability certificates to reach minimum cut off of 40% is a common norm for many. That restricts benefit of the eligible candidates to acquire privilege. Especially, among the lower income and rural groups who are poorly informed or not at all informed about the benefits and programs. Thus, potentially it excludes from the market. The labour market in India shows dismal situation, as many youths are out of the labour force due to job shrinking. Older surveys have already proved that PWD employment rate has fall down to 42.7% to 37.6% over 1991 to 2002, considering inclusion of extra group i.e. mental disability. In that duration, however, there is no significant change among the employment rate of those sub-groups (World Bank, 2007). Lack of infrastructure, employment generation, built environment, adaptive job structure etc. are the few dimensions which are the drivers of the employment of the disabled in the market. The feeling of less potential of the disabled employees, wastage of time and money, 2

additional emotional support and required modification are the main features of non-inclusive employment, unequal treatment and negative stereotyping. In rural set up, the lack of opportunity, low education, agri-based work, distance to work place, poor mode of transport is a barrier. Discrimination is cited through poor employment rate, wages, promotion, type of occupation they are involved in etc. (Grammenos, 2003). To contribute into the labour market educational and vocation support is of utmost importance. There also it fails to achieve full participation. This scenario is similar in many other parts of the world, which suffers from non- inclusive policies and poor welfare practices. In India, study regarding disability and employment based on large scale data is few. Over the decade change in participation of the disability in employment shows synchronization of the disabled with the present labour market. The change in disability definition is also a challenge to measure the dynamics of change with Census data. Through the employment exchange information, the paper tries to reveal job seeker, job gain etc. along with the disability benefits given during that time. The study is an effort to see the change in the employment participation, whom we can include in the labor market and how functional is our employment exchange and different benefit schemes in the country. This paper tries to find out the level of participation among different disability in the working ages. The dissimilarity in labor participation across gender and place of residence also needs to be seen to understand how inclusive our society is. To understand the benefits of welfare scheme in different states of India. Data and methodology: For the study, I have used Census of India (2001 & 2011) data. This is full enumeration of the disabled has been done in 5 categories in previous census and 8 categories in last census. The 5 categories are seeing, speech, hearing, movement and mental disability. For 2011 Census, the disability categories are seeing, hearing, speech, movement, mental illness, mental retardation, any other and multiple disability. Most common definition for disabled in India is considered for suffering from more than 40% of the disability. The criteria for selecting the specific disability has been changed over two censuses. The outcome variable considered here is employment defining as the participation in an economically productive activity with or without compensation, wage or profit. Any types of participation is considered while collecting the data. Among the working population the population is divided into main worker (more than 6 months of age), marginal worker (divided into two groups: below 3 months and 3-6 months) and non-workers. The information regarding 3