Work for Diverse Minds

We need to shift the needle towards inclusion in employment for people with psychosocial disabilities

- Lakshmi Narasimhan

FOR years, I met Sundar unfailingly each month as he came to the outpatient clinic to refill his medication and have a chat. Each time we met, he would open with a statement about his work, sometimes scarce, sometimes good and sometimes new. Sundar often longed for the days he spent plucking jasmine flowers; he missed the texture, the soft scent, and most of all, the ability to sometimes show up for work and sometimes not, and yet not be judged or fear losing the opportunity to make a living—for his family of four. Since his adolescence, he had moved through the agricultural fields in a village, finding rhythm in work that may have demanded effort but not regularity. Then industrialisation and gated community developments swept through the entire taluk. The jasmine disappeared beneath the concrete, and Sundar found himself thrust overnight into a labour market that demanded unforgiving mechanical reliability, a near-constant presence and unchanging output expectations. Sundar lives with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When I last met him, he was desperately trying to convince a construction site supervisor to let him work.

His story typifies the injustice embedded in how we understand work. In contemporary India's transformed economic landscape, displacement of traditional livelihoods exacerbates systemic exclusion of people whose minds work differently, whose labour is devalued by the narrow metrics of productivity. The question of employment justice for people with psychosocial disabilities is not 'can they do the work', but how we can dismantle oppressive notions of work and reimagine it to include those with differences.