About the Asia Pacific Regional Centre

The Asia Pacific Regional Office is located in Delhi, India. We have partnered with the Asian Blind Union. Commonly knows as 'ABU', the Asian Blind Union is a non-Governmental, non-religious, non-political and non-profit organization having a regional character. It is one of the six regional arms of the World Blind Union. As many as 26 national organizations of and for the blind based in 21 countries of South Asia, the Middle East and Central Asia constitute the ABU membership. The ABU works to promote implementation and monitoring of all international conventions, covenants and declarations for protection of the rights of persons with visual impairment in the region. In addition to this work, the ABU works toward the empowerment of visually impaired women and is implementing projects on Women and IT in Central Asia.

Meet the Regional Officer: Rajive Raturi

Rajive Raturi is a post graduate in Business Management with over 17 years of corporate work experience in senior managerial positions in India and Kenya. An accident whilst working in Kenya left him with a visual disability leading him to make a conscious decision to work in the social and developmental sector. He now has over 11 years of work experience in the social sector with disability rights as his core area of work.

In this period he has worked towards building skills of persons with disabilities through facilitation of training in techno enabled employment opportunity areas and their employment in the IT and BPO sector. He has worked with national and emerging grassroots DPOs across the country in capacitating them and providing them access to legal services to strengthen their advocacy efforts in furthering the UNCRPD, has initiated national level advocacy campaigns and supported DPOs in filing Public Interest Litigations to influence policy level changes to further rights of persons with disabilities. He has been a member of the expert committee to draft a new disability law in harmony with the UNCRPD and in drafting guidelines for prevention of ill treatment and abuse of children with disabilities in institutional care and has also supported the development of a resource pack for guiding civil society organizations and duty bearers in combating violence and torture against persons with disabilities.

Rajive has co-authored a 1000 page compendium titled Disability and the Law which serves as a resource material for Judges, Advocates and activists and published a report titled Harmonizing laws with the CRPD and has also scripted an educational documentary titled Access to Rights and developed training modules on Indian and International laws on disability.

Contact Information

Rajive Raturi (Regional Officer)