Autism Assessment in Vasant Kunj

An autism assessment in Vasant Kunj is a structured diagnostic process built around watching your child directly, not around filling in forms about them. The centre is in Vasant Kunj itself. This page covers what the assessment involves, how young we can start, and what a diagnosis does and does not give you on paper.

Our Vasant Kunj centre

This is the one locality page where the centre really is in the locality. eMbrace Vasant Kunj is at C-7, Sector C, Pocket 5, in the basement of Grand Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070.

It is our largest team, and the practical consequence is choice: if a clinician is not the right fit for your child, or you need a particular language, there is somebody else in the building rather than a wait for the one person who does that work.

Families reach us here from across south-west Delhi, including Vasant Vihar, Munirka, R.K. Puram, Safdarjung Enclave, Anand Niketan, Shanti Niketan, West End Colony, Moti Bagh and Chanakyapuri.

This is a defined piece of work rather than a weekly commitment: normally two or three appointments plus report writing. It also starts younger than most services here, from around eighteen months, and with very young children we would rather see you sooner and say the picture is not yet clear than have you wait a year for certainty. Where a child has lost skills they previously had, at any age, say so when you call and we will bring the appointment forward.

For parking, the nearest drop-off point and the quickest route at your particular time of day, ask on the intake call. Traffic and parking around every one of these centres change enough through the day that current directions from someone who works there beat anything we could fix on a web page.

When an autism assessment is worth doing

The question is rarely whether a child is unusual. It is whether the pattern of social communication, interaction and behaviour is consistent enough to be recognisable, and whether naming it would change what your child is offered. Early identification matters more here than in any other assessment we do, because what follows it is time-sensitive.

• Limited eye contact, response to name or shared attention in the second year
• Speech that is late, absent, or present but not used to connect with other people
• Strong preference for routine, with distress out of proportion when it changes
• Loss of words, gestures or social skills a child previously had, at any age

Diagnostic evaluation, ADOS-2, sleep, feeding and emotional regulation each have their own page on our autism hub.

What the assessment actually involves

The core of it is direct observation. ADOS-2 is a semi-structured session in which a clinician sets up ordinary social situations, play, conversation, small frustrations, and records how your child responds. To a watching parent it looks like someone playing with your child, and it is the closest thing there is to a standardised way of seeing social communication rather than asking about it.

Around that sits a developmental history from you, structured tools such as ISAA and CARS, and input on communication and on sensory and motor profiles from our speech and language and occupational therapy colleagues. That part is not decoration. It separates a diagnosis from a description, and it is why this team is larger than for other assessments.

What brings families to autism assessment here

Vasant Kunj carries the widest age range for autism assessment and the largest multidisciplinary team, which matters more here than for any other service: speech and language and occupational therapy input sits in the same building as the psychology.

The internationally-schooled caseload brings a specific complication. A child managing a third language of instruction may present as socially withdrawn for reasons that are linguistic rather than diagnostic, and separating those two is a substantial part of the work here.

Who you would see at our Vasant Kunj centre

Dr Supriya Malik, Founder and CEO, and Head of the Child Development Centre at Rainbow

PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Birmingham, where she was also a postdoctoral researcher, and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society in the UK. She designed the assessment and therapy pathways every eMbrace centre runs.

At our Vasant Kunj centre, the clinicians who take this work are:

Mannat Kaur Arora, Psychologist

Professional Diploma in Clinical Psychology from Amity University Haryana and an MA in Psychology from the University of Delhi. Assessment across MISIC, WISC-IV, Conners 3, CBCL, ISAA, CARS and the NIMHANS SLD battery. Works in English and Hindi.

Cheesha Kanwar, Psychologist

Completing an MSc in Clinical Psychology at Christ (Deemed to be University), with a BA (Hons) in Applied Psychology from the University of Delhi. Behaviour therapy and assessment support using WISC-V, NEPSY-II, Conners-3 and BRIEF-2. Works in English and Hindi.

Dr Agrima Aggarwal, Occupational Therapist

Dr Agrima Aggarwal is a PhD scholar in Occupational Therapy at Mahatma Gandhi University of Medical Sciences and Technology. She holds an MOT in Neurology from SVNIRTAR, Utkal University, where she was gold medallist, and a BOT from PDUNIPPD, University of Delhi. She works in paediatric occupational therapy and early intervention, alongside neurorehabilitation and cognitive rehabilitation.

Upasna, Speech Language Pathologist

Upasna holds a Master and a Bachelor in Speech Language Pathology from the Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for Speech and Hearing Disability in Kolkata. Her paediatric work covers spoken language disorders, misarticulation, late language emergence, developmental verbal dyspraxia, developmental stuttering and cluttering, cleft lip and palate, cochlear implant support, cerebral palsy and pragmatic language difficulty in autism.

Which of them you see is decided on the intake call rather than by whoever has the next free slot, and you are told who it will be before you book. Fuller biographies are on our about page.

Schools and services we already work with

Families around Vasant Kunj reach our autism assessment service through several routes, and the institutional ones are worth knowing about.

At the American Embassy School in Chanakyapuri we carry out psychoeducational, cognitive, comprehensive and brief assessments, including risk assessments, and provide therapy for children and adolescents.

We work with The British School in Chanakyapuri on psychoeducational, cognitive and risk assessments, therapy for children and adolescents, and workshops for teachers, parents and pupils.

Through The Medical Travel Company we provide autism and ADHD assessment and therapy for families in the UK, across Africa and elsewhere in India, on hybrid, in-person and online programmes.

Fees, the report, and the certification question

Fees are quoted upfront on your intake call, as one piece of work covering observation, history, report and feedback. The report names the instruments used, states the conclusion plainly, and sets out what your child needs next in specific terms.

On paperwork, where families are most often confused: what we give you is a clinical diagnosis, and schools and therapy services act on it. A disability certificate under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act is a different document, issued by a government medical board through its own process. We explain that route on the intake call rather than leaving you to discover afterwards that you needed something else.

Frequently asked questions