India’s Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities has asked the Assam Government to create a separate department to take care of the disabled persons in the State and to ensure that they can avail benefits of all the Central Government schemes meant to benefit them.
The instruction came on Thursday during a series of review meetings between the Chief Commissioner, Kamlesh Kumar Pandey and different Government departments in Assam as well as with the NGOs working for the welfare of disabled persons in the State.
He said that there are 4.82 lakh disabled in Assam and only about 2.5 lakh of them has disability certificates, which is of foremost importance to claim any benefit under different State and Central Government schemes implemented from time to time.
“I have held a meeting with the Assam Chief Secretary and urged him to create a separate department for persons with disability. He has assured to look into the matter and I hope the Assam Government would soon have a separate department for the persons with disabilities,” he said adding that a total of seven States in the country had already created separate departments for persons with disabilities including Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu and Telengana.
The Chief Commissioner also expressed concern over the fact that there is not enough trained manpower or well trained teachers to teach the persons with disabilities. “This is not only in Assam but everywhere in the country there is huge shortage of trained manpower to teach persons with disabilities,” he said adding that the State universities should departments for disability studies so that enough trained manpower could be created here.
“I have spoken about this to the Chief Secretary and he assured that talks will be initiated with the Gauhati University here to take some steps in this regard,” he said adding that the State Government should also take steps to set up at least one eye bank with all the medical colleges of the State, which will help eradicating visually disabled people.
He further informed that the Government of India had already taken steps to provide Universal Disability Identity (UDId) card to all the disabled so that they can avail the benefits in a easier way across the States.
