The Persons With Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995 came into force on 7-2-1996. This Act is intended to provide equal opportunities to persons with disabilities and to enable them to participate fully in nation-building.
According to this Act, all public buildings, rail compartments, aircraft, etc. must be so designed as to give easy access to disabled people. Evidently there is large scale violation of this provision of law. There are almost no public buildings which provide ramps for wheelchairs and braille signs for the benefit of the blind. If a wheel-chair bound person wants to meet any of the top officials in the city such as DC, MCC Commissioner or MUDA Commissioner, he/she would not be able to do it because there is no wheel-chair access to these offices.
MGP has repeatedly asked the railways to increase the platform height to make it flush with the floor of the railway compartment so that wheelchairs (and aged and infirm people) can get in and out without climbing steps, but no action has been taken till now.
According to the Act, all places of public utility such as roads, footpaths, parks, etc. should be made barrier-free by providing ramps. Again there is large scale violation of the law. None of the footpaths in Mysore is friendly to disabled people. The footpaths, where they exist, are extremely uneven and both wheel-chair users and blind people find them very difficult to negotiate. Ramps can be constructed at negligible cost to allow wheelchairs to get on to the footpaths from the roads, but this thought does not even occur to MCC or the police. They are most probably not even aware of the law.
Pedestrian subways that are being constructed at various places in the city also violate the law since they do not provide ramps. As a result of this violation, disabled people will not be able to cross these roads. MCC and the police seem to have decided that the disabled should not cross these streets no matter what the law says. It is shocking that the central governments is allocating money to JNNURM projects which are violating its own law. First, the government enacts a law with good intentions, then forgets its implementation and finally encourages its violation by giving money to the violators. What an irony!
In more developed countries, laws are taken more seriously. To enforce laws prevailing in those countries and giving equal access to the disabled, pedestrian subways and overbridges are built only if ramps can be provided. Otherwise, level crossings are the rule.