2022
As per estimate around 1 billion people in the world live with disability either in seeing, hearing, speech or movement to mental. Nearly 80% of these people live in low-income countries & belong to poor strata of society.
As per 2011 census India is home to nearly 27 million differently abled people (I'll be using this instead of disabled)
Disability is generally classified into two types. One is when a person is born with a disability while the other is when a person acquires a disability during his/her life.
The reason for the first case being lack of care and medical facilities which results in complications during child birth. If this is kept under control, disability can be controlled to a large extent. Disability and poverty are closely related. Acquired disability could happen due to various reasons including accidents, disasters, wars, violence and other factors. All these are “controllable” (except natural disasters).
Accessible India Campaign was launched in 2015 by the government of India as a nation-wide Campaign for achieving universal accessibility for differently abled people.
Key Features :
- The target of this scheme is to make at least fifty government buildings disabled friendly under the campaign in each of the state and make 25 per cent of the public transport vehicles under government accessible.
- A dedicated website is made where the people can put their views on the accessibility of any building.
- The international airports in the country and railway stations which come under A1, A and B categories will be made fully accessible.
- Special set-top boxes will be made available to make watching TV more convenient for the visually impaired. In the next 5 years, almost 200 persons will be trained to speak in sign languages on government TV channels. Government websites will also be made friendlier by using text to speech option.
- Under the scheme, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment will give free motorized tricycles to persons with 70-90% disability.
- Sugamya Bharat mobile app which provides information on accessible public facilities in a city is also launched. (Only active in big cities.) Then there is a online library for differently abled.
Despite all this people are still not aware about all this initiatives and the differently abled suffer.
So, in my meet up I decided to visit the two government office in my city. Both of them weren't accessible and to top it they didn't knew anything regarding this campaign.
And in one of the office the guard made sure that I leave the premises, he escorted me till the exit (so couldn't click photos.) They said it is being implemented in bigger cities and it will take time to reach in Vapi.
Then I approached a few shop owner regarding accessibility, they said the cost benefit ratio of doing this is very low that hardly any "disabled person" visits them. The irony is we don't have the infrastructure for them to move out in the open freely.
The major hurdle is ignorance, this includes me also. I didn't knew anything about this till I personally felt it after an accident which left me bed ridden for a year.
Possible Reason :
- The population of India is 127 crores out of which 2 crores are differently abled. So the number is small as compared to the entire population, maybe that's the reason for the ignorance , coz people don't "see" more of them around. But their number is more than the total population of many countries in the world, and India has one of the highest numbers of people with disabilities globally.
- In India A significant proportion of people see differently abled person as an object of ‘sympathy’ they need empathy.
We need to move away from the ‘charity-based approach’ to the ‘rights-based approach’.
Let's just try and make our world a better place to live in.
This was my contribution to worldwide accessibility walk of @EmekaUlor
(P.S - This was my second meet up and just like my first meet up, nobody attended, no photo album as people were a bit reluctant and didn't allowed me to click photos.)
