People with disabilities urge CM Stalin for buses accessible by wheelchairs

Their letter – written by petitioners with disabilities Rajiv Rajan, Vaishnavi Jayakumar and advocate K R Raja – comes in the backdrop of a press release on November 30 from the state transport department that they were planning to purchase 1000 buses for ₹420 crore

Chennai: Three people with disabilities wrote an open letter to chief minister M K Stalin on Tuesday appealing him to commit to freedom of movement for the disabled, a day ahead of a hearing on Wednesday in the Madras high court of a PIL demanding public buses that are accessible for wheelchairs.

Three people with disabilities wrote an open letter to chief minister M K Stalin on Tuesday appealing him to commit to freedom of movement for the disabled. (PTI)

Their letter – written by petitioners with disabilities Rajiv Rajan, Vaishnavi Jayakumar and advocate K R Raja – comes in the backdrop of a press release on November 30 from the state transport department that they were planning to purchase 1000 buses for ₹420 crore.

“A ₹42 lakh-bus can only be a truck chassis 1100 mm three-step ‘bus’ or at a stretch a 900 mm two- step high floor bus,” the letter said and posed three questions to the chief minister. “How can those among us, who use wheelchairs, safely board any bus that has steps after the footboard? How can public transport be called public if a class of citizenry is excluded by hostile design? What is the point of making bus travel free for disabled if some disabled people are left behind?”

The standard for accessible buses is to procure low floor buses with 400 mm floor height or with a maximum height of 650 mm with ramps and lift. “To add insult to injury, the press note also resurrected the new-buses-on-old-chassis loophole,” the letter said. They cited a report of the Freedom of Movement Coalition (FMC) released earlier this year titled “How can Tamil Nadu refurbish already illegal buses?” which exhaustively outlines the role of Tamil Nadu government’s Transport Department as “repeat offender” of the legal mandate imposed by the Madras high court Chief Justices A P Shah, Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M N Bhandari over the years.

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act of 2016 and its 2017 Rules set a deadline of two years to make all services (and five years to make existing built infrastructure) accessible, they added. “We cannot allow this unethical, illegal, immoral practice to continue.”