NEW DELHI, Oct 5:
Inching closer to the ambitious project of issuing Unique Disability Identification Card for Persons with Disabilities, the Department of Disability Affairs has released the draft Detailed Project Report for this purpose.
The initiative by the department, functioning under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, would eliminate the hassles of differently-abled people to carry their disability certificates for different purposes, as details about the type of disabilities that they suffer would be made available in a smart card.
The smart card would also have data like disability percentage, personal details, identity, employment details, education details and bank account number of the person.
This is a huge relief for physically challenged people in the light of paucity of authorised persons, who are required to issue disability certificates in different parts of the country.
“The number of disability certificate issuing authorities is not adequate as compared to number of physically challenged persons in the country which affects in issuing of disability certificate. Currently only 20-30 per cent of disabled persons have disability certificates,” the draft says.
It is also proposed that the UDID card be accepted as the Disability Certificate.
“As a result, the Persons with Disabilities (PwDs) will not need to make multiple copies of documents/ maintain/ carry multiple documents as the UDID card will capture all the necessary details which can be decoded with the help of a reader. Hence, the UDID card will be the single document of identification, verification of the disabled for availing various benefits in future,” the report stated.
As per the Census 2011, around 26.8 million people, which is about 2.22 per cent of the total population, suffer from various disabilities in India.
A report, after collating the views received from the general public for the draft Detailed Project Report, is likely to submitted to the Government by this month end.
According to Awanish Kumar Awasthi, Joint Secretary, Disability Affairs, steps are being taken to start the process of issuing the identity cards by March next year.
“We wanted to finish the distribution of the identity cards by March 2016,” he told.
The 2011 Census also notes that Persons with locomotive disability form the largest chunk with 20.3 per cent of the total disabled population followed by hearing impaired with 18.9 per cent, visually impaired with 18.8 per cent, speech impaired with 7.5 per cent, mentally retarded with 5.6 per cent, mentally ill with 2.7 per cent and multiple disabled with 7.9 per cent.
While 69 per cent of the persons with disability live in rural areas and 31 per cent are in the urban areas. (PTI)
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