Q.Yash Singh became the first and youngest Indian to win a medal at the Special Olympics World Summer Games 2015 in Los Angeles, winning Bronze in the 25-metre backstroke. Read his profile and get into groups to discuss his achievements. What do you think motivated him? Are there any messages in his story that inspire you?

Disability Definition — A First Look

Imagine you're trying to climb a staircase. For most people, that's a simple action. But if you're in a wheelchair, the staircase becomes a barrier — not because you can't move, but because the environment wasn't built with your situation in mind.

That's the core intuition behind disability: it's not just about a person's body or mind — it's about the gap between what a person can do and what the world expects them to do.

The Two Big Ideas

Historically, people thought of disability as a purely medical problem: "Your legs don't work, so you are disabled." That's called the medical model. It puts the entire problem inside the person.

But a deeper, more useful view is the social model. It says: a person may have an impairment (like blindness or paralysis), but they become disabled when society fails to accommodate them. A blind person isn't disabled when using a screen reader — they're disabled when a website has no text-to-speech option.

The Precise Definition

In most official contexts — including Indian law (the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016) and the World Health Organization — disability is defined as:

Disability is an umbrella term for impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. It refers to the negative aspects of the interaction between an individual (with a health condition) and that individual's contextual factors (environmental and personal).

Let's unpack that:

• Impairment — a problem in body function or structure (e.g., loss of a limb, low vision).
• Activity limitation — difficulty in executing a task (e.g., cannot walk, cannot read print).
• Participation restriction — difficulty in taking part in life situations (e.g., cannot attend school, cannot get a job).

The key phrase is interaction. Disability is not a fixed trait of the person — it emerges when a person with an impairment meets a barrier.

A Concrete Example

Take a student who uses a wheelchair.

• Impairment: Paralysis of legs.
• Activity limitation: Cannot climb stairs. …