Mr. V.S.Basavaraju shares APD’s various programs and it’s impact.

APD very strongly believes that it wants a holistic growth of the disabled, so we have to cover a wide area.

We have people’s organization and advocacy; this is our major focus of the work. Here we mainly try and organize disable people to come as a group to understand their rights and how to work towards accessing the rights. Once we are able to support them, we move to the field of therapy. As most disable people need some kind of therapy in order to get mobility, so that they can get out to the life.

We also make sure that the family members are equipped to provide the various needs of disabled people. So we talk to the parent groups, teachers and other family members, this to ensure that people with disability has support from every body.

We have to develop therapy based on region, needs and resource specific. We try and develop programs, what is culturally appropriate based on the area that they live in. We currently support over more than 3,500 people with various kinds of therapy. The need is enormous as a result we are also training lot of other people to provide therapy to the needful.

In education we want to give them a greater opportunity to prepare themselves before going to mainstream school. We do a basic preparation and very severe disabled can carry on our support for some time. But, once they are ready we put back to the mainstream school. In mainstream school we help the teachers, peers and the family members in carrying out the study of the child, in the region he/she lives. Any additional support required then the child and family are welcome to get from us.

We also have a program on economic development of people with disability. So we run a whole lot of vocational program. There are about 35-40 courses. We were able to put in more than 1,300 people to job, so that they can become productive to the nation. They earn from Rs. 1,500/- to Rs. 25,000/-. So impacts have been really great. They are able to perform like anybody else.

We network with lot of organizations, industries, and government department, to make sure that people with disability will have an access to quality vocational program. We are also trying to build capacities of different places to include people with disability in the vocational opportunity programs.