Disabled-friendly8217; companies honoured

These companies have not just employed several disabled persons, but also provided facilities for them to work and be tax payers like the non-disabled population of the country, the NGO National Centre for Promotion of Disabled People said. Moreover, the fact that two of the awardees are from the private sector on which there is no legal compulsion to employ the disabled has made them all the more eligible for the awards, says Javed Abidi, who runs the organisation.

The BPCL, India8217;s second largest oil refining and marketing company with a turnover of Rs 256million and more than 30 million customers, has 139 people with disabilities in its workforce of 12,411.

These include 114 orthopaedically-impaired, 18 visually-impaired and seven whose hearing is impaired. The company has taken care of the special needs of these employees too. The visually-impaired are given a customised computer with a scanner screen reader and OCR, allowing them to work independently. At the time of recruitment, a person with disability is allowed an extra 10 years in the upper age limit.

Infar India took in its first batch of disabled employees in 1981, the international year of the disabled. Six girls whose speech and hearing were impaired were assigned the job of inspecting individual ampoules in the packaging section of its injection department.

At present, there are 18 girls whose speech and hearing are impaired in the company, besides other disabled staff. A person with severe cerebral palsy using a head pointer has created, and now manages, the Infar India8217;s website. Also, thechief of a regional sevice unit, an orthopaedically-impaired person, is considered one of the company8217;s best in that work area.

Titan Industries, a joint venture of the House of Tata and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation, which started in 1987, won the prestigious President of India award for Outstanding Employer of the Disabled People in 1990 and again in 1993, besides getting state awards twice. Today, at its factory in Hosur, Titan has 169 disabled employees, that is, 5.22 per cent of a blue collar workforce of 3,235.

The law has mandated three per cent reservation for disabled in all government sector companies. A survey conducted recently by the NCPDP found that none of the government companies among the top 100 in India were anywhere near that limit. In the government sector, just 0.5 per cent of jobs went to the disabled, while it was 0.28 in the private sector. And, MNCs kept just 0.05 per cent of their jobs for the disabled.