Dr Zafar Khan Safdar
Pakistan has millions of citizens whom the state has effectively designed its public life to exclude, yet we do not even know how many of them there are. The blind man crossing a road without an accessible signal, the wheelchair user facing seven steps at a government office, the deaf child sitting in a classroom where nobody knows sign language, the mother carrying her disabled child through a hospital built without them in mind. These are not exceptions to Pakistan’s system. They are evidence of it. Estimates run into the millions, but disability has been consistently undercounted. That is not a statistical failure. It is a governance failure. A state that cannot count its citizens cannot plan for them, budget for them or hold itself accountable for them. Behind every missing number is a child without a school, a worker without a job and a family left to cope alone.
Pakistan has no shortage of laws protecting persons with disabilities. It ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011, while federal and provincial laws provide for employment quotas, education, accessibility and social inclusion. The problem is not what Pakistan has promised. It is what Pakistan has failed to enforce. A quota does not create a job when departments ignore it. A right to accessibility means little when a government office still begins with stairs. A legal entitlement is worthless to a citizen who has neither access to the system nor the power to make the state honour its own promise.
Employment and education expose the same failure at different stages of life. For persons with disabilities, exclusion often begins at the school gate and follows them into the job market. Many schools remain inaccessible, teachers are rarely equipped for inclusive education, transport is a major barrier and families often lack the resources to provide specialised support. The consequences are predictable. A child kept out of school becomes an adult shut out of work, and an adult denied work is pushed further into dependence and poverty. Pakistan does not merely deny millions an education or a job. It too often denies them the independence that education and work are meant to provide.
Disability can turn poverty into a trap from which families struggle to escape. Medicines, therapy, assistive devices, transport and specialised education can consume an income already stretched to the limit, while one parent may be forced to leave work to become a full-time caregiver. Then comes healthcare. Rehabilitation is not a luxury when physiotherapy, speech therapy, prosthetics, hearing support or assistive technology can determine whether a person lives independently or remains dependent. Yet these services are concentrated in major cities and remain beyond the reach of many families. For a poor family in a remote district, distance from rehabilitation is not merely an inconvenience. It can become a lifetime of dependence.
The problem does not end at the doors of government offices and hospitals. It follows people into our streets, buses, footpaths, markets, universities and public parks. How many can a wheelchair user actually enter? How many crossings can a blind person navigate safely? How many public announcements can a deaf citizen access? How many government websites work with assistive technology? We treat accessibility as a construction detail when it is actually a condition of citizenship. A city that cannot be safely used by all its citizens is not fully public.
Perhaps the deepest failure is that Pakistan still treats disability as charity instead of a right. A wheelchair becomes an act of generosity, a stipend a favour, a rehabilitation camp a publicity event and a special school a symbol of compassion. But persons with disabilities do not need our pity. They need their rights. The real question is not how much kindness the state can offer, but whether its institutions allow every citizen to study, work, travel and live with the same dignity as everyone else.
This requires the state to stop treating disability as a separate welfare issue and start treating it as a governance obligation. Count people properly, publish the data and budget according to actual need. Make public buildings, transport and digital services genuinely accessible, enforce employment quotas, train teachers for inclusive classrooms and bring rehabilitation and assistive technology into mainstream healthcare. Most importantly, stop making policies for persons with disabilities without giving them a seat at the table. Nothing about their lives should be decided without their voice.
Disability is not somebody else’s problem. It can enter any family through birth, illness, accident or age, and when it does, the difference between dignity and despair can come down to something as ordinary as a ramp, a school, a job or a rehabilitation centre. For the wealthy, independence can sometimes be purchased. For everyone else, it depends on whether the state has done its job.
Somewhere today, a mother is lifting her child into a bed because the house has no accessible bathroom. A student is sitting at home because the school has no ramp. A qualified graduate is being judged by a wheelchair before a degree. An elderly citizen has stopped leaving the house because the pavement outside has become an obstacle course. They are not asking for pity. They are asking for a country that sees them, counts them and makes room for them. Pakistan can write equality into every law it wants, but equality means little if a person cannot enter the same door, sit in the same classroom, compete for the same job and live with the same dignity. Until that becomes ordinary, citizenship remains conditional on the body a person was born with.
The writer is Ph.D in Political Science and visiting faculty at QAU Islamabad. His area of specialization is political development and social change. He can be reached at [email protected] and on X @zafarkhansafdar.
