ABSTRACT
Vocational rehabilitation is the most tangible and perceptible of all processes of rehabilitation. It even enables the person to purchase other rehabilitation aids. The field entered as a systematic process only in 1968 with the start of two Vocational Rehabilitation Centres for the Handicapped (VRC) at Mumbai and Hyderabad, as a Research project assisted by the USA. While vocational rehabilitation was one of the components in other hospital-based projects started around the same time, the focus of VRC was exclusively on vocational rehabilitation. The Muthukumaran Committee on education in the educationally forward state of Tamil Nadu found that even in 2007 there was a drop-out rate of about 70 per cent among non-disabled at the Secondary School level. A few educational institutions run pre-vocational services, but mostly focusing on non-employable or uneconomical trades such as candle making, newar making, handloom, hand composing, chalk making, embroidery, and so on.
