In a beehive of cubicles at the Nokia Siemens Networks office in Gurgaon, sits 35-year-old Nitin Goyal surrounded by office files and tabulation notes. An MBA from the University Business School in Chandigarh, Goyal started out as a finance executive in 1997, became group head of corporate treasury and got promoted again as an internal auditor earlier this year. Though Goyal’s career had been going places, he himself did not. A road accident 12 years ago left him paralysed from below the waist and bound him to a wheelchair. But today, Goyal is one of the cheerleaders of a new corporate policy that welcomes people with disabilities. “My wheelchair has no more relevance than my pair of spectacles,” he says.

A few years ago, the likes of Goyal would have made for an exceptional or even odd fill in the corporate workspace. But with companies in the high-growth sectors tapping into uncharted talent pools, people with disabilities are now frequently found in corporate cubicles across the country. Sectors such as IT, IT-enabled services (ITes), business processing outsourcing (BPO), hospitality, retail and telecom happily welcome them as employees. “One big reason is high attrition rates,” says Shanti Raghavan, founder and managing trustee of Enable India, an agency that assists in finding suitable employment for the disabled. “Also, the demand now for skilled labour far outstrips the supply. So, these highgrowth sectors have no choice but to look for suitable employees, including the disabled.”

The trend is most visible in the BPO sector. Take the case of the Bangalore-based Progeon, which launched an initiative in 2005 to employ disabled people in droves. Currently, there are over 150 employees with various degrees of disabilities in this Infosys-run company. According to Nandita Gurjar, the vice-president of human resources at Progeon, by the end of this year, about 2 per cent of its workforce would be people with disabilities.