If you don’t learn to compete in the real world, warns the 26-year-old Asian businesswoman, if you don’t learn how to "market" yourself, you eventually become dependent on family. Or, even worse - she rolls her eyes in mock horror - "on hordes of do-gooding hippie social workers".

Unable too walk since a car crash five years ago, Sushila has no trouble running the family business.

Brushing off cries about the pretty girl, the tragedy, the young life ruined, she completed a degree in Business Administration, convinced her late father’s employees of her managerial acumen and put a stop to talk by her uncles of a company take-over. Under her control, the business has made record profits.

Her money and her success, says Sushila, is down to hard work and her refusal to worry about racism, sexism or any other "ism".

Sushila belongs to the small group of middle-class disabled who can, to a large extent, buy their way out of their disabilities. It’s not quite so easy for other disabled people.

Severe disability leads to unemployment; unemployment to poverty. Poverty, coupled by indifference from local and central government, turns impairment into disability. Not surprisingly, poorer disabled Asians, doubly-discriminated against, get the worst deal.

CHAND MIA, enjoying tea and biscuits at the offices of Apasenth, a support group for disabled Bangladeshi people and their families set up in 1984 in London’s East End, says he wouldn’t miss this regular Wednesday morning social for all the curry in Bangladesh.

He chats with friends. A new member explains that the council still hasn’t installed an adapted shower for his disabled daughter.

Chand shouts across the room to Shofiur Rahman, Apasenth’s co-ordinator, who takes the man’s name and details.

Chand’s daughter, Selina Begum, 22, has moderate learning difficulties and some trouble walking. Since joining Apasenth, she’s become a regular member of the girls’ club, where she’s made new friends, developed her self-confidence and learnt important life skills - personal hygiene, using money, making conversation. She’s now a student at Hackney College.

Apasenth’s other activities include a day care project, day trips for its members - this year Hastings, Thorpe Park and Margate - parties to celebrate religious events and a research project examining how disabled Asian people do in higher and further education.

However, despite similar projects in other parts of the country, the outlook for disabled Asians remains bleak. As with most things, the main problem is money: it’s difficult trying to run a busy project on a shoe-string.

Shofiur, for example, has a minute budget from donations and local businesses. He can only afford two full-time workers. Run off their feet, they can barely cope with the huge demand.

Shumsull Khan, co-ordinator of Adapt, the Asian Disability Advisory Project Team in Bradford, agrees that more money is needed.

He says that his project faced innumerable delays because of difficulty in getting funding.

"It boils down to money. We know what local disabled Asians need, we know how to provide appropriate services, but everyone’s strapped for cash these days."

Sushila might argue that Asians are tenacious people. But she should realise that when someone kicks your feet from under you each time you try to stand, eventually you stay down.

Disabled law no threat to business

DISABLED people’s rights as customers with special needs were limited until last week.

The Discrimination Disability Act (DDA), made law last Monday, makes it illegal for "service providers" to treat disabled customers differently from other members of the public.

Under the Act, businesses - everyone from the smallest cornershop owner to the biggest blue-chip corporations - will no longer be able to offer a lower standard of service or offer it in a worse manner; businesses will no longer be able to provide service on less favourable terms.

And the Act won’t stop there. By 1998, or perhaps 2000 - the Act is vague on this, "service providers" will have to take "reasonable steps" to change anything which makes it difficult for a disabled person to use their service.

By the year 2000, if a disabled person can use the service with the help of auxiliary aids - hearing induction loops, information in Braille - the provider will have to take "reasonable steps" to offer those aids.

By 2005, where a disabled person finds that a physical feature makes the service difficult to use, the provider will have to take "reasonable steps" to make alterations.

The disabled also receive new employment rights under the Act. Employers with 20 or more employees will have to treat disabled staff in the same way as able-bodied staff.

The Act had a stormy passage through parliament. Most disability groups, including the major charities, have criticised the vagueness of its wording.

Sarah Talbot-Williams of Sense, a charity for the Deaf-blind, gives the typical response: the DDA is weak and ineffectual; it raises huge question marks. "Reasonable steps", after all, could mean anything.

Business organisations are equally alarmed. Larger businesses are taking steps to avoid any potential legal tangles. But smaller businesses seem unready for change.

Businesses are already snowed under by legislation, according to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). It says many may be tempted to ignore the Act.

The Act’s vagueness, together with the lack of a commission to enforce its provisions - like the Commission for Racial Equality or the Equal Opportunities Commission - makes it likely that the Act’s parameters will eventually be set through high profile cases in the law courts.

Some charities have indicated that they may sponsor individual disabled people, pay their legal costs, in order to arrive at legal precedents that give the Act more force.

Jan Stevenson, a senior research consultant at Deloitte & Touche, warns businesses that the Act may prove to be a "lawyer’s paradise".

"This is unlikely, at least in the early days of the Act," says Caroline Underhill, a barrister specialising in anti-discrimination law.

However, she does think that eventually judges will be asked to decide what - in the context of the DDA - "reasonable" means.

Businesses which calculate that the risk of being sued is so small it’s worth taking may find that they can "get away with it", she says.

However, it is a risk. Her advice is that the DDA is legislation on the statute books: "you ignore it at your peril."