A special scheme to cater to the needs of special children

For parents of children with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities, there’s now help at hand.

For parents of children with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities, there’s now help at hand. The National Trust — an autonomous statutory body under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment — is currently giving final touches to a first of its kind scheme in the country that will provide “lifelong care and shelter” for such children and individuals.

To be launched by the end of this year, the scheme assures a minimum quality of care-related service throughout the life of the beneficiary and it will come with a guarantee from the National Trust. Though parents will have to bear the cost, the services provided through this scheme would be affordable. The Trust proposes to reserve 25 per cent of the total beneficiaries for children of below poverty line parents and services provided to them would be entirely sponsored by the Trust. In fact, the Trust is currently negotiating with reputed agencies to reserve services for BPL families.

Although the services pertaining to the scheme would be extended through NGOs, not all NGOs working in this sector would be eligible. “The structure of the scheme is ready. We are now identifying the service providers. The response is extremely good. Since we want to ensure that high quality service providers are selected, we are hiring a professional agency to rate them and thereafter, they would be empanelled with the National Trust,” said Joint Secretary and CEO of the National Trust Atul Prasad. “There is a huge demand for a service of this kind. Parents are ready to pay, but unfortunately a reliable and affordable service was not yet available in the country,” he pointed out.

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Chairperson of the Trust, Poonam Natrajan, said though the broader idea is to provide lifelong care, the thrust would be to make such individuals self-reliant. “Our main aim is to help them lead a normal life,” Natrajan told The Indian Express.

Explaining the details of the scheme, Prasad said that parents who can afford to pay would have the option of choosing the desired care service and an optimum payment plan, depending on their needs and income. To make the scheme efficient, parents would be made a part of the group that would manage these services. Further, to extend the benefits to the poor, the draft of the scheme would create a corpus through contributions from different stakeholders in order to cross-subsidise it for BPL families.

The ready structure of the scheme proposes that the required corpus would be kick started through a sum of Rs 5 crore, provided by the National Trust. This would be “adequate to immediately support 150 BPL beneficiaries for the next 32 years at Rs 1,600 per month, presuming 5 per cent inflation and 9.5 per cent rate of interest per annum”. The aim is to sponsor one BPL person for every five above poverty line (APL) beneficiary.