The mission is to train community level workers on prevention, early detection and intervention in childhood disabilities and to develop such a Module/program which can be highly replicable and can be upscaled for large scale use.

According to WHO, 70% of disabilities can be prevented if proper care is taken during pregnancy, infancy and early childhood. To ensure healthy children it is important to impart information to families and communities on good infant and mother care practices. If a disability still happens, we should detect it as early in its course as possible. This gives time to the family to initiate early intervention steps so that the further deterioration of the impairment can be averted. Normally, a society wakes up when confronted with an adult disabled, whose disability is full blown and the early years when the effect of the loss could have been substantially minimized have been lost.

Once a child has been detected with an Impairment/disability, it is important to initiate early stimulation/ medical intervention steps. Early years for all children have a transformational power. Brains are built over time, neural circuits are wired in a bottom-up sequence, and the capacity for change decreases with age. In the first few years of life, our brains are creating 700 new synapses every second! Hence, the role early detection and early intervention can play in stimulating the brain and promoting development is now being proved by research in neurosciences.

India being a developing country with the second largest population in the world with people residing in diverse geographic terrains and with limited medical outreach, who would be best suited to take up early detection and intervention in disabilities? UNCRPD advocates that it is the grassroot community worker who is best suited for conducting surveys to detect children with disabilities in the communities. The community workers are already trained on issues of mother and child care, health care, community based support systems, CBR etc. It was felt that it would be easy to add on knowledge on causes, prevention, identification and management of disabilities to their existing information base.

A Module for training grass-root level community child care and health workers on childhood disabilities has been developed, field tested and validated. The Training Module developed is such that it suits the educational, experiential, socio-cultural and linguistic background of the target learner. It is within the learning capacity of the trainees-so all medical terminologies have been avoided and it is pictorially rich. The comprehensibility of the module by grass-root level worker has been the major concern and this has always remained in sharp focus. The Module has demystified and de-professionalised the knowledge of disabilities.