India has some forty to eighty million people living with disability, among them thirty percent of them ate children below the age of fourteen years.  In Indian nienty per cent of disabled children do not get any form of schooling. There are number of families which are living below the poverty and many families have to make choices about, which of their kids they can afford to send to school. Parents of disabled children have more difficult choices, as they also have the burden of medical treatment, and others.

No population-based study has been conducted at the national level to supply genuine data on the prevalence and incidence of disability in India. Therefore we must rely on the projections made by trial surveys. According  to an estimation population with disability in India is about over 90 million, of these twelve million are blind, twenty nine million are with low vision, twelve million are with speech and hearing defects, six million orthopedically handicapped, twenty four million mentally retarded, eight million mentally ill.

In a separate survey of children (age 0-14 years) with delayed mental growth, it was found that twenty nine out of thousand children in the rural areas had developmental delays, which are usually linked with mental retardation. The government has no record of the number of disabled students in schools but according to activists the number of children of school-going age who suffer from disabilities may be more than twenty million.

To make the education system more effective, government has promised to include disabled children in all its educational programs, including the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).

Today there are more than three thousand special schools in India; nine hundred are schools for the hearing impaired, four hundred for children with visual impairment, seven hundred for those with locomotors disabilities, and one thousand for the mentally disabled. Very few schools have resource rooms and employ special education teachers to help keep children with special needs in their system. Sadly, these amenities are found in very few cities.

Although India has a growing disability rights movement and one of the more progressive policy frameworks in the developing world, a lot more needs to be done in accomplishment and getting the basics right. We should teach disabled childrens’ parents how to become an effective supporter for their child. A primary goal such backing skill of parents is to empower them to be more successful and knowledgeable about legal provisions and schemes. Informed, supportive families are better able to make good decisions for their child.