Planet Abled (A): Taking the World to India

Planet Abled is a woman-led, for-profit social venture based in New Delhi, India, offering customized tours around India and South Asia for people of all disabilities. Planet Abled was formed in 2016 by its chief executive officer, Neha Arora—herself a daughter of two disabled parents. Planet Abled’s start-up story explains how social ventures can repurpose traditional travel to reveal and reverse multiple types of stigmas (public, cultural, social, and structural) as well as defy and defend against the self-stigmatization of the one billion disabled people in the world (15 per cent of the global population).<br><br>Part A of the case presents the real-time conundrum of continuity of mission in the time of COVID-19 given the complete cessation of travel following the declaration of the pandemic and the lack of economic assistance from the Indian government. Part B describes real-time experiments Planet Abled undertook in a concerted and creative team effort to survive against all odds in the first year of the global pandemic—a period of unprecedented hardship for the global tourism industry. Part C jumps forward to discuss how Arora’s mid-2022 epiphany culminated in an early 2023 tipping point for Planet Abled and the global tourism industry. The three-part Planet Abled case series invites learners to drive system change by engaging them in real-time dilemmas about diversity and inclusion in the specific context of disability rights.

This case is designed for use in undergraduate and graduate-level courses on social entrepreneurship and in system change or social innovation curricula. It is also uniquely fit for introducing social entrepreneurship to disability-related programs and to courses that feature under-represented minorities as entrepreneurs that transform our world from exclusion to inclusion. Its real-time response to COVID-19 also informs programs on tourism by providing the perspective of one billion under-served customers. This case can also be used in policy-oriented programs and cross-cultural programs of development to demonstrate the different difficulties of inclusion pre and post pandemic.<br><br>By following the real-time challenges that a woman-led for-profit social venture experienced when bracing for the impact of COVID-19 global pandemic, this case introduces learners to the nuts and bolts of system transformation. Learners analyze and discuss how Planet Abled’s unique, global-award winning model defied multiple types of stigmas before the global pandemic. After working through the case and the assignment questions, learners will be able to do the following:<ul><li>Experience how social venturing can design and deliver multi-level system change.</li><li>Appreciate the systemic nature of stigmatization for the one billion disabled people globally.</li><li>Confront the role of industry in perpetuating stigmatization.</li><li>Discover, define, and distinguish different types of disability-related stigma.</li><li>Undertake the work required to understand the progressive nature of defying public, cultural, social, and structural stigmas and iteratively link mission and model in ways that aim to destigmatize disability.</li><li>Understand the role of lived experience in crafting and scaling up models of allyship in the context of disability-related stigmatization.</li><li>Link the mission and model of Planet Abled with the disability-related inclusion aims build into the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).</li></ul>

• system change
• social innovation
• diversity and inclusion
• disability
• stigma
• pivot
• global pandemic