"If I am slow, I simply have to start earlier"- Robert La Fon

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As a country, we have tended to wait till a child is clearly detected as "handicapped" and then providing  services to such children, instead of taking a medical/educational approach of trying to diagnose early and remedy the problem. We prefer to use the corrective approach once the child outgrows the stage of maximum readiness compared to a "preventive" one offering a greater chance to children to reach a near normal condition.

The concept of “service” is also quite misunderstood and hence professionals and institutes working with this group of population are always cash strapped. As a result, only the minimum level of services are provided, which may not be adequate to meet the developmental needs of a child.

On one hand, parents do not work with a child at the earliest due to lack of awareness, poor acceptance of the problem and a general tendency to wait for symptoms to turn into obvious disability. Moreover, the rehabilitation programmes offered till date discourage parent participation or do it for a short period of time, in turn making parents dependent on others to care for and train their child. This leads to unwillingness and, at times, fear on the parent’s part to learn to deal with the child and take the responsibility for her training and development.

On the other hand, most institutes that work with individuals with special needs work under the assumption that special children require lifelong care and rehabilitation. Hence the work is geared towards “doing their best” with the handicap situation. Even the institutes offering early intervention and stimulation programmes do it for specific disabilities and/ or therapies. Till 2000, no institute in the entire country offered a complete range of therapeutic services under one roof to children; age 0-6 years with different developmental disorders. Even the institutes offering early intervention and stimulation programmes did it for specific disabilities and/ or therapies. No institute in the entire country, even today, offers a complete range of therapeutic services under one roof to children; age 0-6 years with different developmental disorders. Such a concept  is alien to India and there is no other institution dedicated to this approach.

We adopted an approach where we are able to offer a complete range of services for a variety of developmental disorders under one single roof as against working with any one disorder and its associated conditions. Along with that, our work is based on a   “preventive” approach offering a greater chance for children to reach a near normal condition. Compared to the general approach that have corrective measures, which mostly focus on encouraging the child to take care of self only, employed once the child outgrows the stage of maximum readiness to learn, our work is dedicated to one population group (0-12 years) with individualized instruction.