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• Two disabled persons have joined hands with a group of NGOs and individuals to make air travel convenient for the physically challenged.Jeeja Ghosh and Anjlee Agarwal hope that intervention at the policy level would put an end to harassment to disabled passengers by airline staff.Ghosh, who works for the Kolkata-based Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy, was forced to deplane from Spice Jet aircraft due to her disability, while Agarwal, who runs the NGO Samarthya, was bodily lifted by four male Jet Connect staff from the aircraft despite regulations that wheelchair-bound passengers should be allowed an aisle chair.

• “The recent incidents involving Jeeja and Anjlee highlight that even though air travel has become ubiquitous, persons with disabilities continue to face most of the barriers that we faced 10 years ago,” stated the memorandum on the requirements of persons with disability which was sent to Asok Kumar, Joint Secretary (A) at the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

Memorandum signed

• The memorandum, signed by 25 NGOs and individuals across the country, has urged the ministry to include a disability component in the draft of Civil Aviation policy which was available for public comments on the Ministry’s website until Monday, last week.

Ensure equality

• The memorandum demands disability component in the policy must ensure equality between the disabled and the able-bodied persons and among the disabled persons.The memorandum also seeks accessibility in all aspects of air travel starting from airports to online ticket booking.It also seeks for the revision of CAR PWD (Civil Aviation Requirements on Carriage by Air of Persons with Disability), which is “wholly inadequate in many respects”, to be reviewed to include specific rules to make standards for disabled passengers on par with international air travel.

• A particular area of concern is the nature of training to pilots and ground staff of airlines to ensure barrier-free and safe travel of PWDs, which has been kept hazy in the CAR PWD guidelines.“We learnt about the revision of Civil Aviation policy recently and had asked the Ministry to include our inputs,” said Srinivasu Chakravarthula, governing council member of National Association for the Blind Karnataka (NABK), one of the organisations that had signed the memorandum.

• “The Joint Secretary we communicated was very sensitive and had actually extended the deadline by a week (till February 27) to include our inputs. Both the DGCA and the ministry have been receptive to our pleas and we expect them to address the points we have mentioned in the Memorandum.”Other organisations who had signed the Memorandum include  Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI), Indian Institute for Cerebral Palsy, Human Rights Law Network, Samarthanam Trust, Enable India and Ability Foundation.

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