International Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
Open Access

Abstract

On Question of Feasibility of Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) for the Disabled in SAARC Nations: A Journey Away from the Normative Plinth

Dipanwita Ghosh and Tarit K Datta

The incidence of disability is fast increasing in the industrialized world that we live in. The WHO (2010) study indicates that at least 10% of the population of a developing nation suffers from one kind of disability or another. However, the statistics generated from the Censuses of all SAARC nations (barring Sri Lanka) report the percentage of disabled to the total population at a bare minimum, exposing the casualness in the measuring technique. A study on the funds allocation towards disability rehabilitation in India reflects that the flow has rarely been need-based. Grossly violating the basic principles of the Community Based Rehabilitation plinth that promises rehabilitation for the disabled at their places of residence, the flow of funds has been opportunity based. Borrowing from the famous Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), we can argue that the rehabilitation environment has not been affected by paucity of funds, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing it like bottlenecks in supply chain, asymmetric information, and mismatched demand supply. As these asymmetries characterize underdeveloped countries, we can safely assume that the lacuna in disability rehabilitation exists in the other lower-middle income countries of the SAARC region as well.