Employment struggles continue after pandemic for those with disabilities

Disability activists condemned Indigo Airlines’ poor treatment of a teenager with special needs earlier this month. Another ongoing battle has been the one with employment.

Preeti Monga has been getting more phone calls from persons with disabilities seeking jobs after the pandemic than before. This despite the founder and chief executive officer of the Silver Linings Trust, an organization which works with persons with disabilities (PWDs), having shifted focus from placements to education many years ago.

She sees the rise as indicative of a potential increase in PWD unemployment. There are more people unemployed after the economic ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic which has increased the competition for already scarce job opportunities, which worsens the situation for those with disabilities seeking to find a livelihood, according to her.

“It has become more difficult after the pandemic,” she said.

There has also been the loss of existing means of support with layoffs and economic turmoil costing livelihoods among the PWD population too.

“People have lost jobs for sure,” said Arman Ali, executive director at the non-profit National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP).  He added that he has seen cases where there has been loss of livelihood among those who were self-employed too, in addition to those who worked as employees.

The employment scenario for the PWD community was already worse than average. Only around 24 out of every 100 was either working or looking for work among PWDs. This metric, called the labour force participation rate, was given in the Survey of Persons with Disabilities (July-December 2018), as part of the 76th round of National Sample Survey (NSS). The corresponding figure for India overall was obtained from the 2018-19 annual report of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). It was more than twice the PWD figure (see chart 1).

The lower rate of employment is borne out by other data. They held around 1.2 per cent of jobs in government companies for the financial year 2019-20 (FY20) according to Public Enterprises Survey reports. A Business Standard analysis of disclosures by India’s largest listed companies showed 0.5 per cent PWD share in employment in FY19.

A number of persistent issues such as lack of education and training still affect the PWD population. Only around 52.2 per cent of the PWD population were literate, according to the NSS report, compared to 74.04 per cent for India overall. However, the report also noted that 19.3 per cent had attained secondary level education and above. Many are unable to find a job thereafter, according to those working in the field.

This has meant that the majority of the community is self-employed. This accounts for 59.7 per cent of the kind of work that the PWD community does, with 25.3 per cent engaged in casual labour. Only 15 per cent receive regular wages or are salaried employees (see chart 2).

Arman Ali of the NCPEDP said that corporates can help by becoming equal opportunity employers. They could focus on training and making members of the PWD community employable through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) arms. They could then let them compete on a level playing field for any available jobs without favour.  Providing reasonable accommodation for those hired, such as flexible hours, may help them navigate the workspace.  Government and policy makers could help by encouraging entrepreneurship, he said.