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Poverty brings together a heterogeneous mix of families surviving on daily wages and caught in the vicious cycle of lack of education, unemployment, malnutrition and consequent ill health. This situation coupled with paucity of services, are the main contributors to a disproportionately large number of intellectually disabled persons in low-income communities. SAMADHAN, a registered non-profit organization set up in 1981 in New Delhi, India, has as its dual purpose the betterment of this disregarded community, specifically children with intellectual disability and their mothers. Our philosophy is that all persons with intellectual disability can be helped, if appropriate and timely services are available. Over the years, SAMADHAN has effectively transferred this philosophy into action and developed a viable model of service delivery, using locally available resources and materials. SAMADHAN's strategy is to link services for the intellectually disabled, with the needs of their mothers and of the women in the community. 
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 Children with disabilities do need special teachers, special resources, special methodologies and sometime special environments. These so-called ‘special methods’ are often no more than good child-focused teaching practices, which would even otherwise benefit all children, including those without disabilities. The focus should be on finding ways of creating the condition that will accommodate pupil diversity and facilities the learning of all children.
This programme offers educational, diagnostic and therapeutic services in a regular five days a week school environment. The student teacher ratio is about 1:5. The teachers are trained in making their own individual education plan for each child under the guidance of the Special Educator and also make their own low cost educational aids using locally available materials. Most of the children are referred from the the Early Intervention Unit. The children are between the ages of six and fourteen. After 14 years of age, the children are referred to the Vocational Training Unit or sent to other NGOs for specific training which we cannot offer in our Centre.
Efforts are made to obtain admission for these children in local mainstream schools. However our experience is that even if we do get them into mainstream schools they prefer to continue with us since the non-disabled schools have about 40 to 50 children in a classroom which prevent the teachers from providing quality education and puts great obstacles in the way of our intellectually disabled children since their special needs are never taken into account.
On POPULAR DEMAND..
EARLY INTERVENTION SPEECH THERAPY OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY PHYSIO THERAPY SENSORY STIMULATION MUSIC THERAPY PERSONAL ATTENTION CLEAN ENVIRONMENT AFFORDABLE FEE STRUCTURE SPECIALLY TRAINED EXPERIENCED STAFF ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE OVERALL PERSONALITY
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