Living with 88% locomotor disability, the National Award-winning founder of IDEA has spent seven years making one argument: persons with disabilities should be treated as entrepreneurs and job creators, not welfare recipients.

Mallikarjuna Iytha was in Class XI when he was told to drop science.

The reason was not his marks. It was his disability. Science, he was advised, would be too hard for someone with 88% locomotor disability. The arts would be more practical.

That advice would follow him in different forms for years. Today, it is the reason he runs the Inclusive Divyangjan Entrepreneur Association (IDEA), an organisation that says it has supported more than 2,000 entrepreneurs with disabilities across India.

His work since has been built on refusing to let anyone else decide how far a person with a disability can go.

The first door was science in school. The second came years later, when Iytha set out to pursue doctoral research in environmental science and met the same doubts about whether someone with his disability could do the work.

The third was quieter. In the corporate sector, he found that getting hired was not the same as being considered for leadership. Persons with disabilities could be employed. They were rarely expected to lead.

Together, those experiences pushed him towards one question: what would change if persons with disabilities were seen not as beneficiaries, but as entrepreneurs, leaders and creators of economic value?

An alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Iytha built a long career in India's development sector.

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