This descriptive critical narrative review provides a mapping of the recent landscape, barriers, and emerging trends in the academic experience of MSM (Middle School-aged girls with disabilities) in India and highlights implementation, reach, and impact of NEP 2020. Even taking into friendly account NEP 2020’s inclusive, rights-based, aspirational, flexible, contextual, cutting-edge, global-plus, curricula, trainable pedagogues, promises, commitments, pronouncements of digital connectivity for our SEDGs (Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Groups), the realities on the ground are truly, no pun intended, uphill, arduous, heartbreaking in their outcomes. Unlike previous schemes such as SSA and IEDSS, which had no intersectional lens, these schemes did not take into account cumulative gender-disability issues. Barriers to GWDs such as stigma, infrastructural inaccessibility, and undertrained educators, compounded by absence of disaggregated data, are ever-present, and in rural and marginalized contexts particularly acute. Drawing from a thematic analysis of this review, inequities drive policy and practice and outcomes before and after NEP 2020’s publication, bringing to light successes achieved and areas still underperforming. It requires an ongoing, systemic, unified rollout alongside regulatory mechanisms like the RTE and RPWD Acts, bolstered through inclusive pedagogical practices and community-based approaches. This study underscores further the critical need for inclusive education in realizing SDG 4 and by extension, realizing empowerment and lifelong learning for GWDs.
Arya et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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