REMEMBER Hirotada Ototake, the young handicapped Japanese who appeared on the front page of a national newspaper recently?
The 23-year old graduate of Tokyo’s Waseda University is referred to by a huge number of his young admirers as “he no whole body” as he was born without limbs.
The ever cheerful, laborious and spirited Ototake is actually the author of a 1999 bestseller No One’s Perfect.
The message he tries to put forward through his writing is rather clinical, “Whatever that we do is not only for ourselves but for everyone, and to be born human means that each of us has a certain role to play.”
Indeed he has. In this age when the young are conveniently considered “spoilt and hopeless”, Ototake has managed to debunk some of this tactless stereotyping.
One of Ototake’s hopes is that the discrimination against the disabled people in Japan would stop.
However, the types of disabling restrictions that exist and the experiences of disabled people, both individually and collectively vary from society to society and from time to time.
Such variations as do occur are not random but determined by a range of factors, such as the social obligations to the disabled people and their rights in a given society.
How are we in Malaysia doing as far as our care and concern for the disabled people go?
These questions figured somewhat prominently at the recent IKIM seminar on the “Role of Parents in Developing the Personality of School-Going Children”.
According to statistics, at the end of 1999 the number of disabled people who were registered with the Social Welfare Department stood at 86,348. The breakdown consists of 12,874 blind, 15,876 deaf, 29,469 physically handicapped and 28,129 mentally impaired.
But the actual number is much higher. If the rule of thumb of the United Nations is applied whereby one per cent of the total population of a country is made up of disabled people, then Malaysia should presumably have about 220,000 individuals in this category.
They are obviously missing some of the benefits that come with being a registered disabled person, such as the eligibility for government financial incentives.
An average of RM4 million is spent annually to assist disabled people to, for instance, purchase special supporting equipment. Incentives and allowances are also allocated for those in the workforce.
Further, various institutions have been set up to provide disabled people with special training programmes in order to prepare them for self-sustaining careers.
And indeed this is the case nowadays. Several organisations, both public and private have provided steady employment for the disabled.
The number of disabled individuals who have achieved a high level of academic qualification is also on the increase. It is encouraging, too, to note that at least one toll highway operator in the country has begun to engage the deaf to man their booths.
Despite these positive developments, the attitude to the fate of disabled Malaysians still leaves much to be desired.
Many a time, Malaysians seem to be indifferent to the needs of disabled people. It is no secret that quite a number of our buildings are yet to be “disabled-friendly”.
We have talked a lot about accessibility. But the truth is many facilities remain inaccessible to those who are “less than normal”.
But even then, a statement made by a physically handicapped guest of the seminar summed up the pathetic nature of some members of our society, “a building may be accessible, but the people within it may not be so”.
In line with the issue of accessibility, reserved parking at public places or special seats on public transport for the disabled are still very much lacking.
For example, although assignments of VIP parking places at some of our airports are almost never overlooked, very seldom do we find those reserved for VSP, these “very special people”.
Further, it was highlighted that disabled people who attended schools had to face many obstacles. This ran from the out-of-phase syllabi to the lack of ramps and special booths in properly gender-assigned toilets.
Parents of disabled pupils wish to know why, unlike the other children, theirs had to share a unisex bathroom? Surely, we cannot assume that a disabled child has less desire for privacy, can we?
Then there was the debate of whether disabled children need to be segregated and taught at special schools or would they be better off studying at ordinary ones.
This naturally draws a lot of feelings and sympathies as the fact remains that the more they are brought into the mainstream the better are their chances of success, in academic and perhaps more importantly in life.
Some parents also related incidences in some developed countries where medical breakthroughs had managed to reduce the level of dependency of disabled individuals on other people.
They argued that the inability to provide equal opportunity for all may run counter to one of the cardinal rights of individuals according to Islam, that is “the right to equitable treatment regardless of gender or other factors, such as being handicapped”.
All in all, there is vast room for improvement in how we treat the disabled in this country.
As there are so many angles to cover from education to health to human resource, perhaps it is time that a separate chapter on the disabled be introduced in the Eighth Malaysia Plan currently being prepared.
To say the least, the development of the disabled should be as high on the nation’s agenda as the development of youth and women.
By giving it a special mention in the plan, more effective measures can be taken to enhance the future of disabled people in this country, making it true to our motto of creating a caring society.