'The Many Hurdles I Crossed To Make It to College'
How disability barriers almost prevented Shreya Chaturvedi from pursuing her dream to go to college – until they couldn't
As Shreya waits in her wheelchair in the corridors of Delhi University’s Mata Sundri College for Women, she unlocks her phone and plays ‘Tere Mere Milan Ki Yeh Raina,’ a melodic song from the 1973 Hindi film Abhimaan. She breaks into a smile and starts humming and then gets carried away. Her lilting voice runs through the corridor.
“I can’t believe that we can use phones in college. I can now listen to songs anytime!” she tells me.
For the last three months, 22-year-old Shreya has spent every waking hour imagining this day.
The Quint followed her from July to November 2022 — to document her tumultuous, but ultimately triumphant, journey to college.
On 7 November 2022, she is at the college of her choice for the very first time – three months after she took the entrance test for college admissions. But she is yet to join – a lot of things still need figuring out.
On this day, Shreya has woken up at 5 am, and Pratibha, her 62-year-old mother and her only caregiver, has helped her get dressed in a purple kurta. She is wearing new golden bangles to mark the day.
Shreya has cerebral palsy and spasticity of muscles. She uses a wheelchair.
Her school life was no easy ride – and the chances of attending college have been on shaky ground. It has all come down to logistics.
But, despite all odds stacked against her, almost every time I meet her, she says – “Just because it is difficult, that does not mean we should give up... Darr se matt daro. Dar ka fitrat hai aapko rokna (Do not be afraid of fear. It is the nature of fear to stop you).”
On 7 November 2022, she is at the college of her choice for the very first time – three months after she took the entrance test for college admissions. But she is yet to join – a lot of things still need figuring out.
Shreya has woken up at 5 am, and Pratibha, her 62-year-old mother and her only caregiver, has helped her get dressed in a purple kurta. She is wearing new golden bangles to mark the day.
Shreya has cerebral palsy and spasticity of muscles. She uses a wheelchair.
Her school life was no easy ride – and the chances of attending college have been on shaky ground. It has all come down to logistics.
But, despite all odds stacked against her, almost every time I meet her, she says – “Just because it is difficult, that does not mean we should give up... Darr se matt daro. Dar ka fitrat hai aapko rokna (Do not be afraid of fear. It is the nature of fear to stop you).”
A Day of Hope
Pratibha is trying to seek support from the college administration. Shreya needs help to complete her daily tasks such as commuting to and from college, and using the washroom. The academic counsellor assures Pratibha that the college would help her to “the best of its ability”.
But at noon, Shreya tells her mother, in hushed tones, “I was not able to attend a class today.” To which her mother replies, “Give it time, Shreya...”
Shreya got admission to the BA programme at the college with Music and Hindi as her subjects. The classes for both subjects have not begun at the time.
But the day does not go in vain.
After Pratibha has spoken to the administration, she wheels Shreya into the lift and takes her to the ground floor of the college. Classes are on for the second-year and third-year students. It is around 1 pm – and the college is bustling with activity, with the Dramatics and the Music societies setting up desks for first-year registrations on the college grounds.
While her mother grabs a cup of tea from the canteen, the sound of the tabla and singing wades through – one that evokes a smile on Shreya’s face. “I am getting drawn to the music... I like this college. I can imagine studying here,” she says.
A Testing Time
I first met Shreya on 15 July 2022 outside an exam centre in DU’S north campus. She had appeared for the Common University Entrance Test (CUET), and told her mother that she "breezed" through all her papers.
A world of possibilities lay bare in front of Shreya’s eyes when she said, “I want to study Music and Language. Music, because it heals tired minds. And Language, because I want to become a writer or a teacher.”
But the day had its own set of hurdles.
For three days in a row, Pratibha did not know whether Shreya would be given a scribe to help write her examinations.
The uncertainty pushed her to arrange for her own scribe.
Even after the examination, Shreya said, “Everybody was really helpful inside the centre, but there was no ramp, so the staff had to lift my wheelchair to get me to the classroom on the second floor.”
“It has been all quite stressful,” is how Pratibha recalled the day.
The Fight for Inclusivity
Three months since Shreya sat for the entrance test, the mother-daughter duo is now weighed down by another set of logistical uncertainties.
Pratibha has six months left before she retires from her job as a librarian. She works from 9 am to 6 pm, and her office is on Delhi's Ring Road, around 10 km away from Shreya's college.
Moreover, unlike school which had fixed timings, Shreya's college classes end at different times on different days of the week. This makes it even harder for Pratibha to pick her daughter up on time.
Shreya also has online music classes at 4 pm on weekdays and her physiotherapist comes home every day at 7 pm.
However, this is not Shreya's story alone. Starting from inaccessible toilets in schools to a lack of ramps in colleges, a number of hurdles prevent students with disabilities from completing their education. And this is reflected in data over the years.
Wasim Ahmad, Assistant Professor at Government Rehabilitation Institute for Intellectual Disabilities, Chandigarh, tells The Quint that persons with disabilities find it difficult to access higher education due to a slew of reasons, including physical inaccessibility such as transportation from home to the institute and within the institute, finding accommodation, and facing negative attitudes and stereotypes.
“The college is around 18 km from home... even if I manage to drop her off in an auto early in the morning, I will not be able to pick her up because my work gets done later in the evening. We are hoping to keep a domestic worker for Shreya – but that’s an expensive option,” says Pratibha when I meet her in their two-room apartment in Kishangarh in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj in October 2022.
The other option for Shreya would be to stay in a paying guest accommodation or a hostel near the college.
But every time the word ‘hostel’ is uttered, it conjures up an image in Shreya’s mind, “What if the girls that I am living with are not friendly? What if someone bullies me? I will have nowhere to go.”
Shreya’s fears are rooted in her trauma of having been bullied in school.
She had studied at the Government Girls Senior Secondary School in Vasant Kunj, which was only a few minutes from her home. After nursery, Shreya was in the special wing for two years. In Class 9, she struggled with Mathematics and was held back for a year.
Her teachers would help her out, too. Shreya recounts, "For instance, for the Physical Education exam, the teacher would ask me questions such as "What are five things you can do in order to lead a better lifestyle?" The teacher would ask me to show a few asanas, which I would do while sitting.”
Apart from the blip in the ninth standard, Shreya performed decently in her academics, and had a penchant for co-curricular activities as well.
Here she is, proudly showing us the medals she won from her feats in school.
She rummaged through some of the singing certificates that she won in school. “Many of my teachers were very helpful. They used to encourage me to take part in march-past and singing competitions...”
But her thread of happy memories broke there.
“I would often need help to go to the washroom. The help was not always available. Sometimes, my classmates would take me to the washroom and help me get on the seat. I would ask them to turn around. But when they would turn, they would start laughing.”
Her voice did not falter, as she went on to narrate more such instances; “I think I was in Class 9 at the time. I got my periods when classes were getting over. Everyone was leaving for home. I asked a friend to call someone to help but she did not. Some of my classmates took me downstairs. I was starting to feel very uneasy, and I ended up urinating in the wheelchair. Instead of helping me, the girls ran away, leaving me alone at the main gate.”
But she hopes that college will be different.
When Shreya first visited Mata Sundri College For Women, the hurtful memories from school still lingered.
She recounted, “I was struggling a bit to open the door of the college washroom. One or two of the girls then said, "May we help you?" I get a feeling that the girls here will be helpful... more than they were in school.”
As they took a round of the college, Shreya and her mother saw glimmers of hope in the corridors – an internal complaints committee board and then an anti-ragging committee board on the walls.
Pratibha heaved a sigh of relief as she showed Shreya a board with the words ‘Say no to ragging, yes to a joyful campus’.
'All That My Mother Does'
Pratibha is perpetually tackling more than one task simultaneously. When she comes home from work at 6 pm, she first ties Shreya’s hair into a plait and gets her ready for physiotherapy.
She asks Shreya how her day was while making tea at the same time. She helps Shreya to the washroom and takes care of household chores, all at once. Whenever Shreya faced issues at school, she would request a day off from work.
When they were still uncertain about college, Pratibha said, "I do the best that I can for my daughter. People question why I won’t send her to college, but it is not that easy."
"If I opt for early retirement now, I will lose out on retirement benefits, which will be helpful in the long run. I am still trying my best and hopefully something will work out.”
Two weeks before this interaction, Shreya said, “I know that I will go to college. That is because whenever my mother sets her mind to something, she does it.”
Pratibha, whose family is originally from Gujarat, married her husband when she was 36. Shreya was a premature baby. In a few months, doctors told Pratibha and her husband that Shreya had cerebral palsy.
Pratibha said that their marriage was not a happy one and that she was afraid for Shreya. Therefore, she left her husband and started her life afresh when Shreya was a year old.
Shreya has no memory of her father, who is no more.
But what she does know is that her mother has done the best that she could, given the circumstances. The gratitude is reflected when Shreya recites a poem that she wrote about her mother in school:
She told me how to live,
She told me how to express.
My mother has a heart of gold,
She taught me how to be bold.
Pratibha's determination helped Shreya through her school years.
When Shreya was struggling with Mathematics in Class 9, Pratibha wrote a letter to Delhi Education Minister Manish Sisodia asking him to permit the school to exempt her from giving Math exams.
Pratibha received a positive response from Sisodia's office, and Shreya was given an option to leave the subject.
Shreya recalled, “My mother would help me with school projects as I could not make them alone. Then, for the viva, I would learn the project content and they would ask me questions based on that."
Pratibha’s friend Shashi Aggarwal is among those who have been there to help, whenever the mother-daughter duo needed it. Speaking about Pratibha, Shashi remarks, “We were neighbours at one point, and we kept in touch ever since. I have seen her overcome a lot of difficulties over the years. She has put so much effort into ensuring that Shreya’s studies are not hampered by circumstances. Pratibha has a lot of willpower.”
And Now, To College...
In the time it took to overcome the logistical hurdles, Shreya missed out on the first month of her classes. Pratibha had to find a domestic worker to drop and pick Shreya up from college. The expense on the domestic worker is Rs 10,000 per month. Add to that the daily cost of travelling, anywhere between Rs 400 and Rs 600.
When we spoke to Shreya and her mother on 27 November 2022, they were gearing up for Shreya's first day of college.
“We are hoping this works out well. Tomorrow is Shreya’s first class,” Pratibha says excitedly.
Shreya adds, "Education is everyone’s basic right. We are guaranteed it under the Constitution. Now, I am looking forward to making new friends and having new experiences.”
The next day, Pratibha made gajar ka halwa to mark her daughter’s new chapter.
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