Budget identifies employment avenue for physically challenged
India has a bad track record as far as transport facilities for differently-abled passengers are concerned. In a bid to change that, Indian Railways has decided to provide railway stations and trains with several facilities to make movement easier for differently-abled and elderly passengers.
While presenting railway budget for 2013-14, railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal has promised measures like escalators, lifts and wheel-chairs to make boarding trains and exiting from stations convenient.
The proposed facilities include provision of 179 escalators and 400 lifts at A-1 and other major stations, affixing Braille stickers indicating the layout of coaches including toilets, providing wheel chairs and battery operated vehicles at more stations and making coaches wheel-chair friendly.
In order to provide an employment avenue to disabled people, Bansal has proposed to reserve a specified number of Jan-Sadharan Ticket Booking Sevaks (JTBS) jobs for them, keeping in view the fact that the PCOs at stations have become largely redundant after the mobile revolution in India.
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