Rs 1,000-cr scheme for disabled kids

All disabled children between 14-18 yrs of age would soon be entitled to an annual grant of Rs 3,000 for personal needs, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jul 7, 2008, 23:39:38 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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All disabled children between 14 and 18 years of age would soon be entitled to an annual grant of Rs 3,000 for personal needs, apart from schools taking care of their educational requirements.

The HRD Ministry has mooted a Cabinet note for a Rs 1,000-crore inclusive education scheme for children with special needs at the secondary level. This could replace the earlier scheme meant for integrated education for disabled launched in 1974. The Finance Ministry gave its approval to the scheme last week.

With the scheme, the HRD Ministry intends to bring a larger number of disabled children under the inclusive education fold by increasing the disabilities covered from four to eight — blindness, low vision, leprosy, locomotor disability, mental retardation, autism, cerebral palsy and mental illness. The scheme — aimed at benefiting six to seven lakh disabled children — will also provide funds to improve the learning environment for the disabled in schools. “There is a component for teachers’ training to understand disabled students, creating special facilities at the secondary level and a barrier-free environment in schools,” a ministry official said. It also provides for free transportation facilities from home to school and arrangements for their medical needs. The cost of their education would remain free.

The objective is to retain children with special needs till the secondary level by making the scheme compatible with programmes for the disabled till the elementary level under Sarva Siksha Abhiyan.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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