Poverty and disability with special reference to rural South Asia

Abstract

Being disabled as a result of an impairment (a loss of function) handicaps the indivudal, but the private individual is also handicapped by the way disability has been treated in discourse. The lack of knowledge of disability as a development problem and of the interaction between poverty and siability amounts to a taboo, it is not surprising to find that nonclinical, field-based literature on this subject is very patchy. It is often characterised, understandably, by the same 'special pleading' visible in the much larger literature on social aspects of nutrition