Opinion The Express View: Discomfort over shifting former PM Manmohan Singh’s seat in Rajya Sabha should be the beginning of a long-overdue conversation

In the ongoing Budget Session of Parliament, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s designated seat in the Rajya Sabha has been shifted from the front to the last row. The change was reportedly made to allow him more space to manoeuvre his wheelchair. The senior Congress leader’s mobility-related issues could well be age-related. But the change in his Upper House seat has once again brought into focus a glaring deficiency in India’s buildings and public spaces — inaccessible toilets, wheelchair-unfriendly architecture and chaotic roads mean that going to work, attending educational institutions and meeting friends is a daily struggle for the country’s disabled.

According to the 2011 Census, India has about 27 million people with disabilities — about 2.2 per cent of the country’s population. Experts reckon this to be an undercount — a large number of people do not report their disability due to social stigma and many people with special needs fall off the radar because of the ableist bias of the surveyors. In 2015, the government embarked on the Accessible India Campaign (AIC) to create a “barrier free environment and for independent, safe and dignified living” for this section of the population. The programme targeted the built environment, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ecosystem and the public transport system. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act of 2016, which came into force a year later, stated that “all public buildings shall be made accessible” to the disabled by 2021. At that time, experts had warned that the failure to set up a robust enforcement and monitoring mechanism could jeopardise the infrastructural upgrading envisaged by the AIC and the Disabilities Act. Their apprehensions seem to have come true — the 2021 deadline has been breached. According to Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment data, less than 50 per cent of government buildings and barely 8 per cent of public buses in the country met the Disability Act’s requirements in December last year.

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Enabling initiatives for the country’s disabled have consistently drawn criticism for being trapped in the charity paradigm. In 2017, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court said that the approach of such programmes should be geared towards providing a level-playing field for “people with special needs”. It underlined the importance of sensitising authorities and the public at large. Initiatives to create environmental sensitivity in urban areas are examples that awareness and sensitisation drives work. Rainwater harvesting structures and green building norms, for instance, are now part of the playbook of large segments of India’s construction sector. The conversations over shifting a former PM’s Rajya Sabha seat should lead to this long overdue sensitisation.