A new home for the mentally disabled — on the drawing board for the last five years — may soon come up in Narela under a mega plan of the social welfare department. The facility is expected to take the pressure off the existing home, Asha Kiran, which has faced a host of problems ranging from overcrowding, deaths and allegations of human rights violations. The plan for the proposed Rs 350-crore facility, which will be able to house around 600 inmates, will soon be sent to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for approval, and will subsequently be taken up by the Cabinet, officials said. It was first envisaged in 2013, during the last days of the Sheila Dikshit government. “The new home will not only be bigger but will be an integrated complex where training will be provided to volunteers. Inmates will be taught vocational skills, and medical facilities such as physiotherapy will be provided. It will be a world-class facility,” an official said. The Asha Kiran home, where 11 deaths in two months had triggered outrage last year, currently houses 970 inmates against the sanctioned capacity of 510. The original sanctioned capacity at Asha Kiran was 350, an official of the social welfare department said. The department’s proposal to build a bigger home spread over 10 acres in Narela took proper shape by 2015, with the building design and other components ready. But it got delayed as the department managed to get the land use pattern changed to public/semi-public use from residential/recreational only in late 2017, an official said. In fact, in 2013, a team comprising social welfare department officials, architects and the then director of Asha Kiran had visited Maharashtra and Gujarat to look at such homes run by NGOs, and had subsequently submitted a report to the government. But the project did not take off due to “bureaucratic complications”, an official said. Once the AAP government came to power, the architectural plan of the proposed complex was sent to the then social welfare minister Sandeep Kumar. But Kumar was sacked over an “objectional CD”, and the secretary, too, was transferred. “Considering the magnitude of the project and the money involved, the new secretary decided that it needs to be cleared by the Chief Minister and the Cabinet. He wants the three components of building, equipment and human resources to be considered simultaneously, as very often buildings come up but there are no human resources to actually run them,” a senior official said.
