I am talking about the disabled, the ignored minority who provide politicians with Page One photo-ops every year on December 3, the day when it is mandatory for the world to remember that there are some among us who may not have all the God-given gifts the rest of us are born with, but who are as able as most of us.

We are periodically reminded of their innate ability to transcend disability when a muscular dystrophy-afflicted Sanjay Bhatnagar becomes the first handicapped Central Group `A' officer to be selected in an open competition, or when a JavedAbidi, confined by spina bifida to a wheelchair since childhood, becomes the country's most vocal champion of disability rights, or when a vision-impaired George Abraham organises the first-ever World Cup Cricket for the Blind.

Yet, for 50 years, and despite the Persons With Disabilities Act, 1995, all that we have cared to give to this precious minority is some feel-good acts of charity. Like all of us, the disabled want jobs, toilets in public places that cater to their special needs, ramps in public buildings, aisle wheelchairs in domestic flights doable things like that, not stuffy sympathy, least of all from politicians.

Since the 1996 general elections, our disabled minority has been asking for something the rest of us take for granted -- the right to vote. Ask Abidi and he'll tell you how harrowing it is to go to vote. He's lucky -- he has a car, an attendant, yet he has to park his car at a stipulated distance away from the polling booth, which invariably doesn't have a ramp to facilitate thesmooth movement of his wheelchair.

In the last election, therefore, Abidi, because he's articulate and no polling officer would like to mess with him, had to stamp his ballot paper outside the polling booth and hand it over to a babu, who could simply junk it in case the vote did not suit his personal political preference. At least Abidi can go to a polling booth and argue out his case. Imagine what happens to disabled people who are poor, illiterate and inarticulate? Or to the blind, who have no way of knowing that their ballot paper is being stamped the way they want it to be?

All that the disability rights groups are asking for is that they be extended the postal ballot facility already being enjoyed by the armed forces, and that blind voters be extended the courtesy of ballot papers printed in Braille.

Not an impossible demand, but the Election Commission is sitting on it. Funny, isn't it, how good ideas never find takers in our bureaucracy? One more good idea given short shrift is to get Censusenumerators add up the actual number of disabled people. Again, not a difficult task, but real numbers can only help our policy-makers figure out the extent of the problem and its state-wise variations, vital inputs for a national strategy for the disabled. The business of numbers is so tricky, in fact, that we have three sets to accept or reject.

The World Health Organisation insists that at least 10 percent of any low-income country's population is disabled, but, relying on sample survey figures, the government claims it was 1.9 percent (or 16 million) in 1991, a figure disability rights groups contest, saying it is an underestimation, for the official definition of disability doesn't include autism, learning handicaps, thalassaemia, haemophilia, or even conditions like congenital heart disorders that severely impair a person's ability to live normally.

This confusion over numbers may have been something we could have lived with if our `welfare state' had responded to the challenge of disability withthe urgency it calls for. But that is yet to happen, and with an allocation of Rs 141 crore in the 1998-99 Union Budget, which works out to about Rs 20 per disabled person (that is, if we accept the disability figures given by the rights groups), there doesn't seem to be much hope for the future either.

In the forty years since the first employment exchange for disabled people was set up in Mumbai, just 100,000 disabled people have found jobs about 4,000 get to enjoy this privilege every year, even though, according to the National Sample Survey of India, 1991, the country had 7 million employable disabled people. Compare this with China, where 70 percent of employable disabled people are productive members of the society.

Fortunately, the corporate sector led by the Confederation of Indian Industry has woken up to the huge productive potential of the disabled population, inspired, perhaps, by the Titan success story at Hosur (Karnataka), where the company employs 169 disabled people (or 5.22 percent ofits blue-collar workforce) for a job that requires split-second coordination between the hand and the eye.

The Titan example, though, is still an exception. The rule is this bit of statistics -- we have 4,000-5,000 NGOs working in the disability sector, yet less than 1 percent of our disabled children receive education. These real numbers mock at our complacence, at our national habit of brushing problems under the carpet. The next time you go to vote, remember ours is a 95 percent democracy, and that no one really cares for the 5 percent who've been disenfranchised.