Dear readers, I am coming to you a little less upbeat than usual. The news has been heavy and so has the work of making sense of it. I am writing this piece from a sweltering Kuala Lumpur. In a typical Kashmiri, dam chu sahi ( it is too humid). Extreme weather events like cloudbursts, heatwaves, flash floods and this year’s super elnino killed hundreds in the sub-continent in the past few weeks. I am invited to be part of the workshop, convened under Chatham House Rules, discussing climate resilience. I am representing India’s 27 million Persons with Disabilities. 

Kashmir lives on a Powder KegKashmir has always known rain. What it did not know was humidity that clings to the skin, flash floods that erase roads overnight or summers that feel less Himalayan and more tropical. Growing up in the Valley, summer evenings carried a familiar coolness. Ceiling fans gathered dust, and the idea of oppressive humidity belonged to distant cities on India’s coast. Today, the air feels heavier. The seasons no longer arrive when they should, nor do they leave when expected. Climate change, once something I reported on through statistics and scientific studies, has become something I can feel on my own skin.

Every few minutes, my phone vibrates with another news alert. A cloudburst in Chenab and landslides in Pir Panjal range. Roads swallowed by flash floods in the Central part of Kashmir. Rivers overflowing down south. Families searching for missing relatives. Rescue teams racing against time. Every notification carries a question that rarely appears in newspaper headlines.

Who cares for PwDs? When disasters strike, we measure rainfall, wind speed, heavy snowfall, damaged roads and economic losses. Television cameras focus on helicopters hovering above flooded towns or rescue workers carrying children to safety. These stories matter. But they often miss another story- the telling tale of PwDs who are not considered stakeholders in the first place because they are forgotten when policy makers write the disaster response plans. The wheelchair user whose home has become inaccessible long before floodwater reaches the front door. The deaf woman who never hears the evacuation siren. The blind commuter is stranded because public transport has stopped functioning. The person with epilepsy who watches their medication run out while roads remain blocked for days. The child living with severe ADHD whose parents cannot carry both their child and the assistive devices that make everyday life possible. Climate disasters do not create these vulnerabilities. They expose barriers that already existed. For persons with disabilities, climate change is not simply another environmental challenge layered onto ordinary life. It magnifies inequalities that society has long ignored. Every broken footpath, every government building without a ramp, every disaster warning available only in one format becomes more dangerous as temperatures rise and extreme weather becomes more frequent. Climate change does not affect everyone equally because society has never treated everyone equally. Does SDRF Kashmir possess the latest data of PwDs? What is their progress report? How do they rescue PwDs when any natural calamity strikes Srinagar? Persons with disabilities are up to four times more likely to die during natural disasters than people without disabilities.

Healthy people on a sick planet? India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 requires district........

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