Parents of disabled children unsatisfied with govt intiatives

Chandigarh, June 18: Parents of disabled childern are by and large not satisfied with the policies and facilities being provided for the disabled by the government, according to a study.

The government may have launched various schemes and programmes for the social and economic welfare of the disabled, but very few avail of these welfare measures due to cumbersome rules.

The study conducted by Ravneet Kaur under the supervision of Prof Rajesh Gill, Department of Sociology, Panjab University, revealed that out of 80 parents interviewed, 31 were aware of the government schemes while rest 49 were not aware but still wished for better employment prospects for these special children.

The policies or reservations for disabled will only be effective or useful if the people concerned were aware of these. Most of the parents complained that the laws and reservations made for the benefit of the disabled persons by and large exist only on papers.

Those parents who were aware were not satisfied with the government policies and reservations provided to these children.

They want that government should increase reservations, provide more job facilities, set up more educational and training institutes for the disabled children. They felt that there must be a need to arrange awareness camps and counselling programmes so that parents get all types of information which is helpful in their child's development.

The study shows that only five parents had availed the government schemes and rest 75 parents have not availed of any government scheme. The reason behind this is that according to the parents there are a lot of formalities to be fulfilled before getting any government schemes available for these special children.

The parents are not sure whether government is ready to give help after fulfilling all these formalities and the procedures to be fulfilled are very cumbersome and time consuming. They expect that government should provide all the schemes on easy basis so that parents of these children can easily avail these schemes.

According to the study, though new training policies and programmes are being undertaken by the government but unfortunately, the rehabilitation programmes for the disabled are confined to only a few medical centres and only a few children are able to avail these facilities. Paucity of funds has virtually crippled the growth of the institutions meant for the disabled as a result these institutes have not been able to undertake ambitious expansion plans due to fund crunch.

On the basis of research, the study recommends that in order to make people aware of the government initiatives, concerted efforts must be made by the state and central governments to make people conscious of the various schemes or provisions offered by the state for the benefit of disabled children.

All special children must not be classified into a single category. For instance, the physically disabled have different problems than the mentally disabled, the blind are different from the deaf and dumb so on. Therefore different policy programmes must be designed for these categories so that they may become self dependent.

The study has also suggested that special services must be provided at public places, such as bus stands, railway stations and government offices for the convenience of physically charged persons.

The existing faculty in polytechnics have not been trained in the area of special education the study observed and suggested that teachers should acquire new knowledge and skills as well as positive attitude towards disability.

The buildings, classrooms, laboratories, workshops, hostels must be designed in a manner to accommodate challenged students especially those with locomotor disabilities. According to the study there is lack of trained professionals and counsellors who would help these children in providing career guidance.

UNI