When Dr. Mithu Alur’s daughter Malini was born with cerebral palsy, doctors gave the young parents little hope. At one of India’s premier medical institutions, they were told that their daughter had suffered brain damage, that it was irreversible, and that little could be done.
“My husband and I refused to accept this verdict,” Alur recalls. They were only 22 and 24 then. The couple travelled to England, where Malini was reassessed. She was found to have above-average intelligence, with an IQ of 120. What struck Alur just as much was the way her daughter was treated there, with dignity, sensitivity, and professional care.
That experience became a turning point.
Quoting Mother Teresa, Alur says some people come into our lives as blessings and some as lessons. “I believe Malini is both.” More than five decades later, Dr. Alur, founder-chairperson and president of Able Disabled All People Together (ADAPT), formerly The Spastics Society of India, has spent much of her life fighting to move disability out of the narrow confines of welfare and into education, employment and public policy.
When There Was Almost Nowhere to Go
The India Alur returned to had few options for children like Malini.
In 1966, disability education had been shifted from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Social Welfare. According to Alur, government data at the time showed that only 10 per cent of persons with disabilities received any services. For her, that summed up the problem: the system was offering welfare, not education. Entrenched attitudes and broken policies, she felt, had to change.
The attitudes she encountered could be startling. A health minister, she recalls, once asked, “What is spastic? Is it plastic?” Another question was even more telling: “Why educate them?” Children with cerebral palsy were largely kept at home, with almost no institutional support available to them.
In 1972, Alur founded The Spastics Society of India in Mumbai to show that a different model was possible. “In a country where there were absolutely no services for the children with disabilities, we founded The Spastics Society of India to demonstrate what was possible,” she says.
The model brought education, therapy, healthcare, and emotional and social development under one roof. She describes the approach as “a little bit of kindness with a large dose of expertise”.
From Special Schools to Inclusion
Alur’s work, however, did not stop at creating better special schools. Over time, she began questioning the idea of segregation itself. “We began with our first model of a special school. We then moved towards inclusion,” she says.
ADAPT widened its admission policy and began looking at inclusion in a broader way. For Alur, inclusive education was not just about children with special needs, but about all children who faced barriers to learning because of disability, gender, caste, class, or religion. “It’s not just a disability-only issue, but an educational quality issue,” she says. That thinking took ADAPT beyond its own classrooms. Inclusive nurseries were started in Dharavi and other inner-city areas, and the organization began working with regular schools as well.
Taking The Fight to Policy
Alur also realized that helping individual children would have limited impact unless government policy changed too. Her doctoral research at the University of London examined the exclusion of children with disabilities from government education policy. The work was later published as The Forgotten Millions: Invisible Children
Training became another major part of ADAPT’s work. Courses were introduced for teachers, therapists, community workers, parents, and government officials, while a postgraduate diploma in special education was launched in 1978. Over the years, the model travelled across India. ADAPT says it now has a presence across all 28 states. Its reach has also gone beyond the country. Since 2001, the Community Initiatives in Inclusion program has trained 414 participants from 23 countries across the Asia-Pacific region
Through four North-South Dialogues on Inclusive Education, Alur also pushed back against the idea that developing countries simply had to copy Western models. “Every region can do inclusive education, but differently from the West,” she says, arguing that inclusion has to be shaped by local cultures, resources and realities.
Five Decades On, What Next?
More than 50 years after she began, Alur is still looking ahead.
She says her vision has always been to move beyond care and towards empowerment, creating pathways for people with disabilities to live independently and contribute meaningfully to society. ADAPT is now working towards the Mithu Alur University for Inclusive Studies, envisaged as a multidisciplinary postgraduate institution focused on teaching, research and community engagement. It has also started an international journal focused on inclusion and disability.
Recognition has followed Alur’s long journey. A Padma Shri recipient, she was most recently conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award on July 31 by the International Forum of Inclusion Practitioners at a conference organized by the World Inclusion Congress in New Delhi for her contribution to inclusive education, disability rights and social transformation.
For Alur, one lesson from five decades of work stands out: change does not have to wait for the entire system to be ready. For Dr. Mithu Alur, that movement began with one child, one family, and a refusal to accept that nothing could be done.
