Assistive Technology: Not just a humanitarian decision

Assistive Technology (AT) is helping people with disabilities to overcome barriers and perform tasks that might otherwise be challenging or impossible. While providing assistive technology to people with disabilities is undoubtedly a humanitarian decision, it is also a smart economic and social decision. Here are a few reasons why:

- Jawahar Bekay

It was very encouraging to see PCQuest cover Assistive Technology products and services in their recent issue (February 2023) thereby giving much needed visibility and credibility to this growing space.

Persons with Disabilities in India should have equal opportunity and ability to earn their livelihood and lead a happy and satisfied life.

The Indian statistics (based on the 2011-16 census) on Persons with disability (PwD) indicate that there were at least 27 million people with one or more of the following disabilities:Seeing, hearing speech, movement, mental illness and multiple things. The actual number today is probably over 100 million. Meanwhile a world report on disability estimated that, more than 1 billion adults and children worldwide were living with some form of disability.

It is imperative both humanitarian as well as economic, to bring this vast community into the mainstream with on-par Learning, Living, and Livelihood (3 Ls) standards. This will not only give equal opportunity to the community but potentially improve the GDP of the country too by a few points. This is a huge, for profit, social entrepreneurship/business opportunity too.