Socioeconomic and geographic variations of disabilities in India: evidence from the National Family Health Survey, 2019-21.

Background: Increasing disability is of global and national concern. Lack of evidence on disability across socioeconomic groups and geographic levels (especially small areas) impeded interventions for these disadvantaged subgroups. We aimed to examine the socioeconomic and geographic variations in disabilities, namely hearing, speech, visual, mental, and locomotor, in Indian participants using cross-sectional data from the National Family Health Survey 2019-2021.

Methods: Using data from 27,93,971 individuals, we estimated age-sex-adjusted disability rates at the national and sub-national levels. The extent of socioeconomic variations in disabilities was explored using the Erreygers Concentration Index and presented graphically through a concentration curve. We adopted a four-level random intercept logit model to compute the variance partitioning coefficient (VPC) to assess the significance of each geographical unit in total variability. We also calculated precision-weighted disability estimates of individuals across 707 districts and showed their correlation with within-district or between-cluster standard deviation.

Results: We estimated the prevalence of any disability of 10 per 1000 population. The locomotor disability was common, followed by mental, speech, hearing, and visual. The concentration index of each type of disability was highest in the poorest wealth quintile households and illiterate 18 + individuals, confirming higher socioeconomic variations in disability rates. Clusters share the largest source of geographic variation for any disability (6.5%), hearing (5.8%), visual (24.3%), and locomotor (17.4%). However, States/Union Territories (UTs) account for the highest variation in speech (3.7%) and mental (6.5%) disabilities, where the variation at the cluster level becomes negligible. Districts with the highest disability rates were clustered in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Punjab. Further, we found positive correlations between the district rates and cluster standard deviations (SDs) for disabilities.

Conclusions: Though the growing disability condition in India is itself a concerning issue, wide variations across socioeconomic groups and geographic locations indicate the implementation of several policy-relevant implications focusing on these vulnerable chunks of the population. Further, the critical importance of small-area variations within districts suggests the design of strategies targeting these high-burden areas of disabilities.