NCPEDP – Javed Abidi Fellowship – Trinayani

So, this is Sumit Parikshit and I look after the fellowship program at NCPEDP which is named after Javed Abidi ji.

You can’t describe Javed Abidi ji in few words or few sentences, that is his legacy, the man was quite unique in his ways and his approach.

Am I not an Indian? The rights that are available to all citizens – the right to go to school and college, the right to go play in a park – those same rights are mine as well. I’m simply asking for my rights.

But essentially if we have to define himself or that person in few words, then I would say that he is one of the stalwarts in the entire movement for disability inclusion who brought together all the groups related to disability.

Because before he coming to India, the groups were fighting for their own sole cases and not as a collective group.
So, his contribution was bringing together different communities related to various disabilities, and fostering collaboration among them.
Whatever progress we see today in our laws, be it the Act of 1996 or the current 2016 Act, it has been possible because of this culmination of the groups.
So, that is how I would like to define Mr. Abidi.

Now, one thing that was quite prominent in his approach was that he always wanted to bring forth the youth and that is how we see the current leaders in the disability space who might have always, in some point of time in their own life, in their own journeys, might have worked with Javed Abidi ji and he might have mentored him or these people in some or the other manner.

So, he was quite focused on youth and we wanted to take that legacy forward.
So, when the discussion started within NCPEDP about how to bring the youth forward in the ongoing movement for inclusion in society, it was emphasized that youth should take the lead.
This is because the youth better understand their own needs.
We all at one point of time or the other start with self-advocacy.

We always start with what we need and we understand how to support that.

But at times, we stop to realize the fine difference between self-advocacy and self-benefit.
So, when we talk about a situation where, for example, you travel by airline, face difficulties along the way, and then take the issue to social media or perhaps speak with their executives, to reach a resolution as to how you can look at that problem of travel, pertaining to say, air travel, which is quite prominent in the social media space, if we talk these days.
What you are doing essentially is finding a solution for self.
In the process, I get it, that the prominence of the solution was so much high, that you don’t care for documentation and evidence building.
At that time, the immediate solution was so important that you might not have dropped an email to that company.

You might not have dropped an email to the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

So, the paperwork that happens in the middle, it is left out in this case.

If there is paperwork, and let’s assume, with time you don’t get the solution you wanted, then you will have documents which you would be able to take to court.

The results of that case can help many more people than just you.

So, that is the fine difference when we talk of self-benefit versus self-advocacy.

But if we look at it broadly, the method is the same and we find a way to work on these things.

And when we look at youth with disabilities, this is something that we realized over the years, that a lot of them have self-propelled intent to do good, but that gets limited to themselves because they miss out on evidence-based advocacy.

So, we can have a program that can build their capacities to do evidence-based advocacy and that is how we started this program where we selected 25 youth with disability from across the country and began the entire program.

This program was also unique in the ways that it was a long-term program.

So, the fellowship was not limited to, say one year.

We were providing a three-year platform to all these fellows.

It was also unique in the sense that we were not asking the fellows to work with any existing organization and contribute to what it was already working on.

The idea was that you come up with your own idea and we will curate that idea.

We will help you work with that particular idea, own it, plan it, strategize it, work on it so that you can look after proper implementation of laws or policies or frameworks in that particular region wherever you want to intervene.

That was the whole idea and uniqueness of the entire fellowship program.

And we started it in 2021.

We have just concluded 21 fellows (2024) who completed the entire fellowship, who were able to do a complete study of how the status looks like in their respective regions, in respective fields of intervention, say health, accessibility, education as they chose for themselves.

And based on those reports, they looked after providing recommendations to the policy makers and even now they are working with the policy makers.

What outcomes have been achieved through the Javed Abidi Fellowship so far?

If we look at the kind of results that we have achieved in these three years, it is quite diverse and something that even we had not realized while we started it because it was also quite, I mean, first attempt for all of us.

So, if we start looking at, say the concern like accessibility, so there was this fellow who turned blind while pursuing architecture course.

So, her self-advocacy started while she was in masters, challenging her own professors that I can very well complete architecture given that space is a realization that is beyond the realm of eyes.

So, I can very much realize a space, design it, understand the constraints of it and work on it.

And with that intent, she started the journey of fellowship, was working in Vishakhapatnam, started her work by collecting as to how Rushikonda beach, which is the most visited recreational space in that particular space, can be transformed into making it accessible for persons with disabilities, given that it’s a blue flag certified beach.

In the process, not only was she able to push the tourism department and get in collaboration with them to change the scenario that was there, she was also made a part of the district committee on disability and currently she is also working with the blue flag certification organization to change their policies as to how they look into universal design, because for them the concept of universal design was to serve disability when it is not just about disability.

So, that focus or that shift in that focus is happening because of her efforts now.

Likewise, if we look in the rural spaces, because when we started the fellowship, we kept the criteria in a way that even youth who belong to rural backgrounds join the fellowship, like they only require to complete matriculate.

When we asked them if they have experience in documentation, we did not limit it to research based documentation.

The intent was that if you are articulate enough to even document a poem on your own, we can train you to document a report and that is what happened.

So, if we look at fellows from rural India’s, one of them got budget for building disabled friendly toilets for girls.

The other person ensured that they incubated people, for the first time in their district, into livelihood generation schemes like mushroom based agriculture.

Likewise, there have been several other measures where fellows have actually mapped the job roles in which disabled people can participate in MGNREGA.

So, all these things are happening because of the efforts of the fellows and we feel extremely proud of whatever they have achieved for themselves and they will continue doing that.

So, as far as the uniqueness of the program is concerned, the good thing was that we used to pay them up to 35,000 per month so that they can take care of expenses related to travel or anything that has to be taken care of in terms of caregiving and things like that.

We continue to take forward the fellowship program into its second stage and look forward to bringing on more fellows who are youth with disabilities to continue doing the good work they can do with us.

And that is how we continue the legacy of Mr. Javed Abidi ji to focus on youth and building their capacities.