According to the World Bank Report-2012, around 40 to 80 million people in India live with some type of disability. Being a country of 1.2 billion, it accounts to 3.5 per cent to 7 per cent of the total population. However, despite years of agitations and struggle by the differently-abled groups to make necessary provisions for ensuring equality and accessibility in all areas of life, the Government continues to ignore them.
At an interactive session with media, prominent personalities from the disfferently-abled fraternity spoke about the need for allowing a leveling playing field to the handicaps for political representation.
Sruti Mohapatra, a renowned social activist, compared the differently-abled representation in India with other countries. She highlighted that UK has a separate portfolio for “Differetly-abled” and countries like Ghana and Tanzania ensure representation from differently-abled. She also told about her difficulties while casting her vote as a differently-abled.
Campaign Committee coordinator Jitendra Kumar Biswal said that political empowerment of the physically challenged community is a must, before the vision of a truly equal and inclusive India, could be realized. “We’re now ready and willing to fight it out and keep doing whatever it takes, until the objective of 4 per cent reservation in seats for the differently-abled, starting from Panchayat to Parliament, is achieved. So, to achieve the desired objective, we’ve decided to start a campaign for the political empowerment,” he said.
Chumki Datta, a prominent differently-abled woman entrepreneur, said that a certain percentage of reservation is already there in place for the physically challenged in the field of education and job opportunities. “But, when it comes to ensuring a given percentage of our representation in political bodies, we’ve been ignored completely.
Political administration is mainly a mental task and we believe we’re as capable as anybody else in discharging the given responsibilities efficiently,” she maintained. Other prominent differently abled social activists who spoke on the occasion included Devanand Sharma from UP and Rajnish K Arya from Raipur.