Our collaborative effort will begin by providing accessible playing infrastructure to the fantastic bunch of wheelchair basketball players of Mumbai and Maharashtra. We aim to provide them with coaching support, employment opportunities and by creating orientation sessions with parents of differently-abled children, suggesting career and healing options so that they do not have to struggle with their child’s future.

Samavesh is Project Mumbai’s initiative towards inclusion of people with disabilities into
mainstream activities. Our key initiative in this space is WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL.

Wheelchair Basketball In India/ Mumbai: The Sport ContextIn India, Wheelchair National Basketball Championships started in 2014.
Since then, the Maharashtra Men’s team has won the Gold Medal in all the 6 Nationals
held till June 2019. No Nationals were held after that due to Covid 19.
9 out of the 10 players representing Maharashtra, in the men’s category, are ex-army players. As many as 8 players have represented India in international matches so far.Alongside, the Maharashtra Women’s team won the Gold Medal in the last two Nationals held in 2018 and 2019. 

The women’s team was formed in Mumbai in 2017. In 2017 and
2018, all 10 players were from Mumbai. In 2019, 4 players were taken from Pune.
So far, 6 Women players (all from Mumbai) have represented India in international
matches.

The entire campaign is called SAMAVESH–MAKING MUMBAI AND MAHARASHTRA ACCESSIBLE.

The premise of this partnership is about CAPABLE AND ABLE.

Our effort would be to create multi-stake holder discussions to ensure that accessibility and inclusivity across society starts getting observed.

Corporate Offices, public spaces and government offices should start including and exercising more sensitivity towards accessible persons and their approach should change. Social media campaigns directing them towards this will take place through sports.

We start in Mumbai and we are hoping that by the end of the financial year, at least fifty institutions across Mumbai would have volunteered to make their institution accessible and pledge to introduce policies and promote accessibility.

In phase two, we propose to take this to at least five tier-one cities across Maharashtra and by year five we are hoping that the slogan ‘Making Mumbai Accessible’ is changed to ‘Made Mumbai Accessible’.