Education in a globalising era: Implications for disabled girls

Abstract

Located in the larger context of globalisation and the changes effected by it in the Indian education sector, the paper looks at the issue of disability and education. The situation, it argues, is too complex and the problems for the disabled child are exacerbated by the caste, class and gender variables. The state while formulating its policies for the education of the disabled children hardly looks at the larger context in which the children are located and therefore most of its programmes are restricted to mere tokenism. In such a situation, the author argues, there is a need to alter the way the question of disability is seen in education and that we cannot understand the problem unless an effort is made to locate them within the political economy of disability. The education of the disabled remains a contested site as it fights the twin forces of globalisation as well as politics of normative hegemony unless we fight the institutional disablism.