ABSTRACT
I pursued our journey from segregated education to inclusive education on the micro (school), mezzo (community) and macro (policy and systems) levels, with a ‘top down bottom up’ approach. We undertook the journey through two international projects during 1999-2005: (1) The National Resource Centre for Inclusion-India (NRCI-I) a six-year Indo-Canadian initiative; and (2) ‘Inclusive Education Practice in Early Childhood’ in Mumbai, a SSI/UNICEF Project. Both projects have been under the aegis of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and both addressed the creation of an implementing mechanism-the how of inclusion of children with disability into existing mainstream educational systems. The Early Intervention Project directly addressed the exclusion taking place in the Government’s ICDS pre-school service dealing with children from two to six years of age. The project and research fi ndings are discussed in Chapter 7. The National Resource Centre for Inclusion project set out to address the six-to fourteen-year-old age group aiming at inclusion in the Government of India’s fl agship program for universal education, ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’ (SSA) and in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) public schools, and the private schools of Mumbai.
