It was a great learning experience for me to be with everyone at the census round table and thanks for the invite.

As a representative of the deaf community, I regret not having been involved in the advocacy process earlier and now wish to try to resolve some issues pertaining to the deaf and understanding of the disability before further damage is done.

I refer to the question that is being asked on disability in the current census questionnaire. The last 2001 census questionnaire has the following disability listed.

1. In Seeing 2. In Speech 3. In Hearing 4. In Movement 5. Mental

This has produced skewed results in the case of hearing impaired persons. The misguided inclusion of “In speech” as a disability has no precedent internationally and even our own laws preclude speech impairment as being a separate condition unattached to any other. Speech impairment is associated with a number of other conditions relating to neurological impairments/mental impairments.

the stats as they stand are:

Speech impaired : 1.64 million

Hearing Impaired: 1.26 million

THIS IS UNPRECEDENTED AND UNHEARD OF. IMAGINE 1.6 MILLION SPEECH IMPAIRED OTHERWISE ALRIGHT PEOPLE. THIS IS IN NOBODY'S EXPERIENCE. YES speech impediments are identified but they are treated and cured and done with. They are not quantifiably large enough to validate a separate question. especially when the potential for mistaken diagnosis is so high!

Speech impairment is however the most prevalent and most commonly seen as the indicator of hearing impairment. We, in India, identify deaf persons primarily by the fact that they are unable to speak. Our country’s many languages have a common word “mook” or “mooka” “mooga” in the south to describe what initially appears to be a speech impairment.

The actual problem is not speech impairment but hearing impairment which prevents the acquisition of a spoken language in normal way and at the normal time in a child’s life as all hearing persons do. The child, therefore who is not able to speak is referred to as “dumb” “mute” “mooka” etc. Enumerators and parents alike have made this mistake and thus we have a large number of persons in India who are called, mistakenly, “Speech Impaired”. The figures for hearing impaired are thus skewed terribly by this mistaken diagnosis.

Children with Autism, Mental Retardation, Downs Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, and others with multiple disability are the ones who also suffer from speech impairment and as such they should be counted in the primary disability they have, as against a symptom of the disability itself.

The idea of these disabilities being mistakenly reported as “speech impaired” would be to compound a mistake and fundamentally wrong.

This large group of persons is not a valid group but rather an anomaly in the counting method.

I would like to request that in the current Census 2011 questionnaire, we move to strike down the question “In Speech”, and thus conform to the provisions of the People with Disability Act 1995, which does not include speech as a disability.

Further it is my concern that, due to ignorance of the actual issues in disability as well as the baseless assumptions that are so favoured by the average individual in Govt., the question as it is framed " Hearing and/or Speech" will be further simplified for the sake of convenience to read as it was before; ie. "hearing" and "speech" separately. and this would end up leading to the same confusion.