Awareness about Disability among School Going Children Aged 9-12 Years in Pune City, India

The Indian community consists of 2.21% disabled people, whose capabilities and strengths are often not recognized by the majority abled population. This inability to identify the specially abled population as co-contributing members of the society hampers their social and educational development. Despite policies and strategies for supportive integration and inclusive education, the beneficial impact remains to be low. There is a desperate need for the Indian community to work towards social integration and self-actualization. This study aims at discovering the degree of awareness about the specially abled population among the younger Indian population. The study is a cross sectional observational study conducted across Pune city, India done in normal school going children aged 9-12 years old. Data collection was done for 116 children for the duration of 7 months in 2021-22. The questionnaire involved personal response questions, tables to be ticked and drawing pictures. The open ended questions focused on getting answers about awareness about their perception of the disabled and their capabilities, their attitude towards such humans, and their skills about communicating with humans having different disabilities. Awareness about disability was observed to be low and more candidates knew about the term 'Handicap' than 'specially abled'. Knowledge about the capabilities of disabled was found to be poor although most candidates portrayed empathetic and accepting attitude towards the specially abled. Relevant skills of the participating children such as the ability to communicate with the specially abled was variable and depended on the category of disability. Further research related to social strata can be conducted to find the correlation between social background and level of awareness about disability. The paper suggests designing and implementing programs as a probable solution to increase the general level of awareness about the specially-abled among school going children. Moreover, developing empathy amongst young malleable minds would also promote social integration. This would potentially increase disability integration achieved in educational institutions consequently leading to higher rates of literacy in the future. (1) 10 graphs of qualitative data results, (2) Pictures of disability drawn by children, (3) Open ended questionnaire