Need to promote assistive technologies for disabled people

Assistive technologies should be used for a wide range of disabilities or impairments in India as it promotes greater independence for disabled people, according to Mukesh Jain, Joint Secretary in Department of Disability Affairs.
"The assistive technology promotes greater independence by enabling people to perform tasks that were formerly unable to accomplish, by providing enhancements to or changing methods of interacting with the technology needed to accomplish such task," said Jain while inaugurating the ASSOCHAM Conference on "Empowering Disabled Persons with Accessible and Assistive Technology" Summit here today.
Jain also advocated the use of multi-dimensional solutions technology like massive open online courses (MOOC), shift from digital literacy to digital citizenship and stressed upon the social enterprise models and data driven policy in India for disabilities or impairments.

As per the official data, about 26.81 million people are living with disabilities in India.
It is approx 2.21 per cent of total population of India. These included people with visual, hearing speech, locomotor or mental disabilities, constituting 2.13 per cent of the population, Jain pointed out.
He further highlighted that in rural India, the prevalence of disability was much higher (31 per cent) as compared to that in its urban counterpart (69 per cent). Among males, the prevalence of disability was significantly higher than that among females.
According to the latest estimates, the country's disabled population has increased by 22.4 per cent between 2001 and 2011. The number of disabled, which was 2.19 crore in 2001, rose in 2011 to 2.68 crore. The decadal growth in urban areas is 48.2 per cent while rural areas disability growth rate has recorded 13.7 per cent.