Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan offers home-based learning for students with severe disabilities, yet problems in access, awareness, and support remain.
Thirteen-year-old Rohan (name changed), a little shy and very happy, envelops his mother in a spontaneous bear hug as three of his teachers and therapists compliment and tease him playfully. We are at Rohan’s house in one of the bylanes of a bustling informal settlement in Dharavi. His mother, Mayadevi Jagannathan, cradling a two-year-old daughter, beams proudly as she says that now Rohan even helps her by keeping an eye on his younger siblings. This is significant for Mayadevi and Rohan’s therapists. Born with intellectual disabilities, he has come a long way, from not attending school as a child to now going to a mainstream school nearby.
Rohan is one of the students receiving therapy and educational support at home through the community programme run by ADAPT, formerly known as Spastics Society of India, an NGO in Mumbai. Gulab Syyed, who runs the programme in Dharavi, says that taking intervention measures home to students who cannot reach school plays an important role in their development, as evidenced in Rohan’s case.
A case for home-based education
Under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, there is a provision to give home-based education for children with severe or multiple disabilities up to grade 12. Through this scheme, 72,186 students were covered with an outlay of ₹20.68 crores across India in 2023-24.
In theory, government-appointed resource persons visit allocated areas to verify out-of-school children with disabilities. After taking basic information about the child and family, including the medical history, the resource persons undertake a case study. They then conduct an assessment of the children’s educational and daily living needs and create an intervention plan. The individualised intervention is carried out in fifteen-day cycles, and parents are trained during each cycle to continue the teaching at home until the next session. If necessary, teaching plans are modified based on the feedback from the parents.
Practically, things may not pan out this way. T Shaheen, who lives in Bengaluru, has a fifteen-year-old daughter. When she could not walk as a toddler, Shaheen and her husband took her to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), where she was diagnosed with Systemic Mastocytosis (SM), a rare and chronic disorder. In patients with SM, excessive mast cells, a type of white blood cell, are produced and accumulate in organs. This results in a continued allergic reaction, affecting the organs.
Link for Original Article : https://citizenmatters.in/home-based-education-bridging-the-gap-for-children-with-disabilities/
