Chennai: As a deadline – July 2022 – To make all infrastructure and public spaces including approaching, defective rights groups in the city have asked all future-deactivated projects.
This happened at the time when Chennai Greater Corporation planned to put a new road, establishing a toilet along the ECR road and renovating parks and other public spaces.
Smitha Sadasivan, Member, Disability Rights Alliance, Tamil Nadu, said the corporation must involve people with disabilities and truthful group disabilities at the design stage itself.
“Chennai Metro Rail made the biggest mistake because it did not include a defective group on the planning stage,” he said.
In 2014, the Civic’s body had promised to make the sidewalk-friendly disabled but Bollard, the lack of tactile signs and the lack of the right slope gradients had made them unusable, Vaishnavi Jayakumar said, members, the alliance of disability rights (Dra).
He added that in 2018, public transport should be made friendly.
“We haven’t met the deadline,” he urged.
As per the right with persons with disabilities, the requirements of disabled people should be harmonized with the building code.
“So the government has no reason, every new infrastructure must be inclusive,” he said.
He explained that basic infrastructure such as e-toilets cannot be accessed by disabled people.
Even for parks, they must be planned in such a way that all parks have at least one inclusive equipment to ensure people with disabilities mingle with everyone and can live a normal life, he said.
Rashmi R, a resident of Ashok Nagar and a mother of a disabled child said that the government usually only added a way for everything and declared inclusive infrastructure.
“But there are more than just the way we need,” he said.
A senior engineer from Corporation Greater Chennai told Toi that several meetings had been held to make roads and sidewalks friendly but there were challenges.
“If we remove Bollard, there will be illegal encroachment and parking.
We will ensure that all future projects include their advice,” he said.