Half of the disabled population in India employable: Report

According to market intelligence firm, Unearthinsight, the right policies and strategic shifts can enhance employment opportunities for people with disabilities with around half of them in India having the potential to be employed.

According to the report, India has almost 3 crore people with disability (PwD) of which around 1.3 crore is employable but only 34 lakh of them have been employed across the organised sector, unorganised sector, government-led schemes or are self-employed.

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“The country has a potential worker bandwidth of 3.4 lakh non-tech graduates, polytechnic and diploma holders who could be skilled and brought into mainstream services sector and knowledge industry to push per capita income,” the report said.

About 17,000 PwD students graduate in engineering or computer science and aligned streams. Of these graduates, the IT services sector employs around 8,000 PwD employees whereas software product employs around 5,500 and the alternate tech talent.

In the technology sector, TCS and Accenture are larger employers of PwD talent in India’s IT services sector while SAP and Microsoft lead the high skilled tech PwD talent in software product industries in India.

“Technology and retail are leading the way in skilling and creating employment opportunities for the PwD talent pool. The organized retail sector employs over 13,000 PwD professionals whereas over 8,000 PwD professionals are employed by the technology sector,” the report said.

The banking and financial services sector is an emerging employer for PwD talent wherein SBI is the largest employer of PwD in the back-office and front-office jobs, it added. UnearthInsight founder and CEO Gaurav Vasu said that the contemporary business strategy towards the expansion of the talent pool is focused on realizing the ideals of diversity and inclusion at workplaces.

“There is a long way to go, as India is sitting on a huge PwD talent pool that can play an important role. With the right policy and strategy shift, there is a real chance that we work towards raising employability rates among the PwD population,” Vasu said.