(City) Education still a distant dream for UT's disabled

BOX-I: Literacy rate 41 pc

* As per the data, the total disabled population of J&K is around 3,61,153. Of them, 1,50,959 disabled people are literate

* The literacy rate among the disabled population in J&K is 41.8 per cent, while the national literacy rate among the disabled population is 54.42 per cent

BOX-II: Disability as per law

Section 2 (i) of the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995, defines disability as blindness, low vision, cured of leprosy, hearing impairment, locomotor disability, mental retardation and mental illness

Vikas Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, February 21

With 2,10,194 disabled people illiterate in Jammu and Kashmir, the tall claims of the government and social organisations of providing education to them have fallen flat.

As per the data, the total disabled population of J&K is around 3,61,153. Of them, 1,50,959 disabled people are literate. The literacy rate among the disabled population in J&K is 41.8 per cent, while the national literacy rate among the disabled population is 54.42 per cent.

The disabled population in J&K is 2.88 per cent of the total disabled population in the country.

Arunachal Pradesh (38.75 per cent) and Rajasthan (40.16 per cent) are the other states lagging behind J&K in terms of the literacy rate among the disabled population.

The data further reveals that of the 3,61,153 disabled population, 2,04,834 are men and 1,56,319 are women. Of the total illiterate population of 2,10,194, 1,01,104 are men and 1,09,090 are women. The population of literate females is much less as compared to their male counterparts.

Of the total 1,50,959 literate people, 1,03,730 are men and 47,229 women.

To make things worse, of the 3,61,153 disabled population in J&K, around 27,939 are children, the highest in the country. The share of disabled children in J&K is 7.74 per cent, while it is 1.37 per cent at the national level.

Further, there are around 80,000 disabled children between the age group of 5 and 19 years in J&K and only 61 per cent are attending schools.

The percentage of the disabled children who have never attended an educational institution is the highest in Nagaland (39 per cent), followed by Assam (35 per cent).