News

Volume 9 Issue 2 - April 01, 2012

Ex-Army Officer the first Indian with disability to be appointed at U.N.I.C.E.F.

D.N.I.S. News Network, India: Former Indian Army Officer, Major Gopal Mitra, has become the first Indian with a disability to be appointed at the headquarters of a United Nations agency. Mitra has recently joined the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (U.N.I.C.E.F.) headquarters in New York as programme specialist. His role will be to provide technical support to enhance the inclusion of children with disabilities in policies and programmes at global, regional and national levels.

Mitra has previously worked with Leonard Cheshire Disability (L.C.D.) as the Inclusive Education Manager for South Asia. In 2008 he was posted as the International Campaigns Coordinator at the L.C.D. headquarters in London, where he was in charge of the Young Voices project which brings together young persons with disabilities from 18 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

After losing his vision in an insurgency operation in Jammu and Kashmir in 2000, Mitra went on to do a Masters in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and followed that with another Masters in Development Management from the London School of Economics.