States will pick 50 spots to make more disabled-friendly after PM's Mann ki Baat speech

Fifty spots in over 50 cities of the country are all set to be made disabled-friendly. 

The move comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s immensely popular ‘Mann ki Baat’ radio talk helped give wings to the idea mooted by scores of people, who all wrote to the PM on the issue.

The government has now asked each state to identity 50-100 public buildings in big cities to be made easily accessible for the differently-abled persons under the ‘Accessible India Campaign’ (Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan). 

First episode

In his very first episode of ‘Mann ki Baat’, PM Modi had expressed his concern about the needs of the specially-abled people, particularly children. He had mentioned Gautam Pal, who had written to the PM highlighting the difficulties.

“He (Gautam Pal) has suggested forming separate municipality, municipal corporation or councils for them. We need to plan something for them for enhancing their moral support. I liked his suggestion and I have experienced this during my days as the chief minister of Gujarat,” Modi had said.

Following the episode, various ministries set out to work to address the concern. While the HRD ministry started a scheme to award scholarships to specially-abled children aspiring to study in technical institutes, the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment formulated the Accessible India Campaign (Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan) as a nationwide drive to achieve universal accessibility. DEPwD is intensively engaging with the public to make the project a success.

A group ‘caring for the specially-abled’ has been created on mygov.in website to involve the people directly.

“Discussions on the website have received a huge response. Currently, it is for 50 cities which includes Varanasi, Faridabad, Ludhiana, Dehradun, Silvassa, Shimla and Nashik. The suggestions received from the people will be submitted to the concerned ministry for further action,” a senior official associated with the website said.

In his first episode of Mann ki Baat, PM Narendra Modi had expressed his concern about the needs of differently-abled people.

Three targets 

A senior DEPwD official said the campaign targets three separate verticals for achieving universal accessibility, namely the built-up environment, transportation ecosystem and information and communication ecosystem. 

The campaign has ambitious targets with defined timelines and will use IT and social media for spreading awareness and seeking engagement of various stakeholders.

“The department has also asked various state governments to identify about 50 to 100 public buildings in big cities and also identify citizen-centric public websites which, if made fully accessible, would have the highest impact on the lives of PwDs. 

Once identified, ‘Access Audit’ of these buildings and websites will be conducted by professional agencies. As per the audit findings, retrofitting and conversion of buildings, transport and websites would be undertaken by various government departments,” the official said. 

Officials said the DEPwD is collaborating with the ministries of home, health and family welfare and tourism, for creating accessible police stations, hospitals and tourist spots, respectively across the country. 

The department is also coordinating with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for enhancing accessibility of television programmes by incorporating features like captioning, textto- speech and audio description. 

Moreover, the DEPwD is also in the process of creating a mobile  app along with a web portal for crowd-sourcing the requests regarding inaccessible places. 

A click away 

“With the app, any person would be able to click a photograph or video of an inaccessible public place and upload the same to the ‘Accessible India’ portal. The portal will process the request for access audit, financial sanction and final retrofitting of the building to make it completely accessible,” an official said. 

The government will also seek engagement of big corporates and PSUs. They will be asked to offer their help to conduct access audit and for accessibility-conversion of the buildings, transport and websites.

As an offshoot of the campaign, the department has also sought ‘Expression of Interest’ from IT firms to prepare the app in all Indian languages to locate nearest accessible places.




Source : Daily Mail , 21st Sep 2015