'20.8 mn households have differently abled persons'

The country had 26.8 million differently-abled people in 2011, constituting 2.21 per cent of the total population of 1.21 billion, showed the Census data released on Tuesday.

In absolute terms, there are 4.7 million more people as differently abled, compared to 21.9 million in 2001.

However, the proportion of differently abled persons to total population remained more or less same in the decade. They represented 2.1 per cent of the total population in 2001. As many as 15 million people were differently abled in 2011, constituting 55.97 per cent of the total people in this category. On the other hand, 11.8 million females suffer from disability, constituting about 44.03 per cent of total differently abled people.

In 2001, 12.6 million males and 9.3 million females were differently abled in 2001. They accounted for 57.53 per cent and 42.47 per cent of the total differently abled persons in 2001, respectively.

The country had 20.8 million households having disabled persons in 2011, constituting 8.3 per cent of the total households, the data showed.

In absolute terms, it represented an increase of 2.05 million households compared to 18.7 million households in 2001.

However, there was less portion of households with disabled persons in 2011 compared to that in 2001. A decade before, 9.6 per cent of the households had disabled persons.

Out of the total households having disabled persons, about 99 per cent are normal households, 0.4 per cent are institutional and 0.2 per cent are houseless households in 2011.

Institutional households mean a group of unrelated persons who live in an institution and take their meals from a common kitchen such as boarding houses, messes, hostels, hotels, rescue homes, jails, ashrams, orphanages etc.

Disabled persons in normal households increased by 4.8 million, institutional households by 65,895 and houseless households by 22,948 during the decade.

The census has taken different-ability to mean people suffering from disability relating seeing, hearing, speech, movement, mental retardation, mental illness etc.