The nine-year-old boy dressed in blue lay listlessly on the pavement in the scorching Mumbai summer afternoon, his ankle tethered with rope to a bus stop, unheeded by pedestrians strolling past.
Lakhan Kale cannot hear or speak and suffers from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, so his grandmother and carer tied him up to keep him safe while she went to work, selling toys and flower garlands on the city’s roadsides.
“What else can I do? He can’t talk, so how will he tell anyone if he gets lost?” said homeless Sakhubai Kale, 66, who raised Lakhan on the street by the bus stop shaded by the hanging roots of a banyan tree.
Lakhan’s father died several years ago and his mother walked out on the family, his grandmother told reporters.
A photograph of him tied up appeared in a local newspaper last week, sparking concerns among charities and the police and he has since been taken into care at a government-run institution, but activists say his plight comes as little surprise in India, where those with disabilities face daily stigma and discrimination and a lack of facilities to assist them.
Kale said Lakhan “tends to wander off” and that there was no one else to stop him walking into traffic while she and her 12-year-old granddaughter, Rekha, were out making a living. At night she would tie him to her own leg as they slept on the pavement so she would know if he tried to walk away.
“I am a single old woman. Nobody paid attention to me until the newspaper report... He was in a special school, but they sent him back,” she said.
Social worker Meena Mutha has since managed to place Lakhan in a state-run Mumbai home, which takes in a range of needy children from the disabled to the destitute.
“Residential homes are very, very few. There’s a major need for the government to do something, a social responsibility to provide residential centers for children like Lakhan,” said Mutha, a trustee at the Manav Foundation helping people with mental illness.
She added that government-run centers that put children with different needs together did not always have the range of facilities required.
“They don’t have the infrastructure, the staff,” Mutha said.
Conversely, non-government organizations “have expertise, but not the space,” she added, highlighting the squeeze on land in the densely-packed city.
Across India, the 40 to 60 million people with disabilities often face similar struggles to get the help they need, activists say.
“There’s no collective responsibility. You have a disabled child, you look after it,” chief executive at Able Disable All People Together Varsha Hooja said.
She added she had seen other cases of parents locking up children with disabilities while they go to work.
A long-awaited bill was introduced into the Indian parliament in February aiming to give disabled people equal rights — including access to education, employment and legal redress against discrimination — but it has yet to be passed.
Lawyer Rajive Raturi was on the committee that began drafting the bill five years ago, and said the Congress party-led government that has just lost power had pushed through a “complete dilution” of the original, especially on the sections regarding women and children with disabilities.
Raturi, who handles disability cases at the Human Rights Law Network, said he hoped the new parliament elected this month, dominated by incoming Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, would “listen to the stakeholders and then make a decision... We can’t change attitudes with an act but if the bill has the right provisions, people will think twice.”
Back by the Mumbai bus stop, Kale squatted on the pavement drinking chai and eating bread on the morning after bidding a tearful goodbye to her grandson. She was hopeful she would get to see him regularly once she acquired an official identity card that would allow her to visit the center.
“I am very happy... What else would I want other than for him to be looked after,” she said
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of