Annual Reports

Over the last 30 years, ASTHA has been able to accomplish several milestones:

It has reached out to over 30,000 persons with disabilities and their families within the urban slums of Delhi
National Disability Helpline has reached out with information to approximately 17,000 families in all states of the country
Conducted over 750 workshops and over 75 research studies nationally, that have raised awareness about disability issues
Enabled more than 500 children with disabilities to access mainstream schools for inclusive education
Over these years, ASTHA has worked in states such as Odisha, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, for research as well as field projects.

Pandemic, pollution and lockdown brings immense challenges at the same time learnings and innovations for the team. But after all these challenges work with children continued through multiple mediums like individual sessions (Online Offline), group sessions, home visits etc. Regular online sessions were conducted during lockdown with distribution of learning kits and TLMs to the children. After the lockdown, sessions were conducted in small groups with necessary covid safety. Post lockdown, as physical movement was not possible, ASTHA’s team of community workers and educators devised many strategies to reach out to children with disabilities and their families.

During the pre-lockdown period, children were coming to the centre two or three times a week. At the centre, the team of special educators, community workers and therapists work together with the parents to implement plans. Plans across all domains of education, therapy, movement and posture goals, fine motor goals, activities of daily living – come together seamlessly along with educational/ cognitive goals, communication, language and comprehension, rights and schemes etc.

Gradually, parents are able to understand how to work with their child and also understand the objectives behind doing a certain task. Material is made available at home besides suggesting alternatives that are easily available at home, to ensure continuity of the work at home.

The nation-wide lockdown, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, had short and long term socio-economic implications especially for the deprived section of India, causing reverse migration, hunger, starvation, loss of livelihood and range of other sufferings. Persons and children with disabilities cut across all social groups and are perhaps the most vulnerable ones. A large number of persons and children with disabilities reside in the urban slums and resettlement colonies of Delhi, and belong to migrant families engaged in unskilled work and are employed in the unorganized sectors. These are the vulnerable population that is often left behind during any humanitarian crisis. It is with these persons and children with disabilities residing in the urban slums and resettlement colonies of Okhla, Tughlakabad, Govindpuri etc. in Delhi that ASTHA has been working with for their rehabilitation since three decades now.

ASTHA, in this year, has initiated intensive community based ECCD interventions. There have been a range of strategies that the organization has followed at various levels. The CBR Early Childhood intervention workers identify children with delays and/or disabilities while building trust and understanding the abilities and needs of the child through detailed discussion with family members. A major thrust area is partnership and linking of families with each other through camps, with groups of mothers and other parents coming together.

The ECCD at ASTHA is supporting children’s development and parenting skills in the early years which further provides opportunities for better preparing children to succeed in school as well as positively influence parents’ attitudes about the value of formal education and acceptance of the child.

In its work with young children ASTHA is consciously moving away from addressing only the impairment-based aspects of children and instead creating a broad-based curriculum that will help the child develop all their abilities at the right age. It is attempting to work towards more transdisciplinary assessments and holistic program planning for children in all aspects of their development. An emphasis on creative activities and inclusive activities involving all children enables the programs to work towards inclusion with fun.

ASTHA is a cross-disability organizations actively working with children and persons with disabilities irrespective of the type and severity of disability. The organisation was started in 1993 as a registered charitable trust.

Our core areas of work include working in the community as well as provision of information resources to the stakeholders. Our activities include providing education and rehabilitation services to children with disabilities so as to enable them to access community service systems such of education, health,
protection etc. We work across all disabilities with a special focus on children with multiple disabilities, cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.

Twenty-five years ago, ASTHA started working against a thinking that children and persons with disabilities would remain at the peripheries of institutions and society and that they did not merit any rights but that their lives were to be managed by others. It was also believed that children and persons with severe and multiple disabilities were to remain hidden in the confines
of the family.

Since its inception in 1993, ASTHA has actively worked with children and persons with disabilities and other marginalized children in urban slums and resettlement colonies in Delhi, India. The main aim has been to work towards an inclusive society where children and persons with disabilities are respected and valued and can lead a life of dignity.

Milestones in last 25 years:

We have touched the lives of more than 25,000 children with disabilities and their families.
Sensitized more than 30,000 persons to the needs of persons with disabilities.
Successfully advocated and included disability concerns in the national and international platforms.
Enabled around 350 children with disabilities in the slums of Okhla slum areas, Govindpuri and the Lalkuan urban‐village in south‐Delhi to access inclusive education in the mean stream schools.
National Disability Helpline has been running successfully and reached out to around 17,000 families in all states of the country.
Workshops and awareness programs are conducted on regular basis to aware persons with disabilities and their parents to raise their voice on issues of disability.
Established Viklang Ekta Mach, Chingari Mahila Samiti and Rahat Group which have been working as agents of change in the community. These groups are running successfully and bringing huge changes in the lives of children and persons with disabilities.

In the Fourth Report, we attempt to look closely at the framework in which to understand the right to education of children. As the disability discourse unfolds after the coming into force of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, there is increasing clarity on how the big conceptual changes the Convention brings in, are changes for children and persons with disabilities that impact all persons and society and states. In short the disability discourse cannot any longer be a discourse in isolation. We try to spell out the framework and ask what data reflects on the health of inclusive education in our country. We make the links between recent trends in education such as school merger and closure in Rajasthan and children with disabilities and then look at how families migrating to Delhi in search of better prospects for their children fare, and how their children are treated in government schools in Delhi. Finally, through a series of interviews we bring the reader the actual experience of children with special needs/disability in education.

On April 1, 2011, our country completed one year of the implementation of the Right to Education Act 2009. This is an Act that details the Right to Education for all children in our country and has therefore great significance for the education of children with disabilities. Given the importance of this Act many agencies and education networks (Plan, Save The Children, Oxfam, NAFRE, CRY and others) across the country came together to do a stocktaking exercise on the implementation of the provisions of the Act in the last one year.

A large meeting was organized on the 31st of March 2011 by all these agencies in Delhi. Keeping this in mind, AARTH-ASTHA in collaboration with PLAN India organized a daylong stocktaking meeting focusing on the progress (or the lack of it) in relation to children with disabilities. This meeting was organized on the 30th March 2011 so that it can feed into the larger meeting and stocktaking exercise on the 31st.