At the next Mumbai marathon, disabled participants will run in the 10-km category
The last few weekends have been liberating for Preetham Sunkavalli. Ever since Class 6, the visually impaired 24-year-old has been doing his runs on a treadmill at home or at the office gym. Though he routinely pulls off 5 km, it is nothing quite like running outdoors.
All that changed one Sunday in November, when the Adventure Beyond Barriers Foundation (ABBF) handed Sunkavalli the opportunity to hit the road alongside Bimal Goculdas, managing director at Dharamsi Morarji Chemical, and together they completed a 7-km run along Mumbai’s Marine Drive. Things will only get better, when the two run together at the 17th edition of the Tata Mumbai Marathon (TMM) next January.
Along with Sunkavalli, there will be 124 other disabled participants at the marathon who will, for the first time, run in the open 10-km category alongside their able-bodied and sighted partners, who lead some of the top corporations in India. In the past, most disabled runners had been restricted to the 1.5-km ‘Champions with Disability’ category. While there were 290 disabled runners at the 2015 edition of the marathon, the number went up to 1,301 in 2019, among a total of around 46,000 participants.
In preparation for the event, ABBF has been organising training sessions at Mumbai’s Marine Drive, a 3.6-km stretch along the Arabian Sea, where disabled (mostly visually impaired) runners are being paired with sighted runners who will guide them in the January event.
While the development may seem like a one-off day worth celebrating, Divyanshu Ganatra considers it to be a major milestone. Ganatra is the founder of ABBF and has used sport as a medium to drive the cause of inclusivity since 2014. He approached Procam International, organisers of TMM, and became their official ‘Inclusion Ally’. While they are starting out with the 10-km run this year, the idea is to eventually open all race categories to persons with disabilities.
“It’s a great way to showcase to the corporate world what inclusion looks like as an experience. TMM is a huge platform and there’s nothing quite like spreading the word on inclusivity from the shoulders of giants,” Ganatra says. Running for the cause was an easy sell to corporates, and those who came on board needed little convincing.
(This story appears in the 20 December, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)