Guest post by PRAGYA DEORA

The 15^th National Para-Athelitic Championship held in Ghaziabad in March 2015 was my first national-level athletic competition that I was participating in. I did not know much about the world of sports, the associated pressures for sportsmen, politics at different levels and most importantly the amount of compromises that the participants had been making in all these years.

Our team left for Ghaziabad and even before we reached we were a little surprised. The condition of roads leading to the stadium was so terrible that we were confused if we were reaching the right place. After we reached, we realized there was worse to come. Working on issues of accessibility in my campus for making our campus barrier free for persons with disabilities, there was an expectation from the organizers that this would be a model of the way a sports competition should be organized in terms of infrastructure, procedures and attitudes. But it was a far cry from it. What screamed at each step was complete insensitivity towards persons with disabilities. Continue reading Lessons learnt from the misdeeds of Paralympic Committee of India – Continuing to speak up: Pragya Deora →