Making India Physically Enabled: Bring Back Inclusive Building Code

Chandigarh is known to be the city beautiful, and I thought so too, until I noticed something strange. Chandigarh was beautiful, but not for everybody. 

My team and I surveyed close to 80 restaurants and public places; we looked for disabled friendly restrooms, an ISL trained employee and ramps within an accessible distance. We found that out of the 50 restaurants, 37 had toilets for different genders, but zero had toilets for the disabled. Only 2 had ISL trained employees and less than 50% had ramps within an accessible distance. Out of the marketplaces, more than 70% didn't have toilets that were disabled friendly, and just 20% had accessible ramps. 90% of the government offices and banks surveyed didn’t have enough disabled friendly toilets, ramps or an accessible entry point. 

The most shocking of all was to see the absence of accessible toilets or ramps in public places like parks, gardens and lakes. And even though a lot of toilets indicated that they were disabled friendly, the doorway wasn’t even wide enough for a wheelchair to fit.

If this was the case in such a smart city, I can’t even imagine what it is like in other cities.

Nearly 7 years back, The NBC removed the clause that stated the necessity of disabled toilets in restaurants. Now, even though, it is necessary for malls and public places to have them, strangely, restaurants are exempted. This excludes an entire part of the population and makes them further distant from living a normal life.

Compromises were made, then and now, and lakhs and lakhs of more buildings got constructed that are not just inaccessible but hostile to India’s disabled population.

What do we take away from this? 2.21% of Indian population is disabled, while that seems like small proportion, it totals up to almost 26 million people. That is 26 million people deprived of basic needs. 26 million people who cannot go out and have a normal experience and are forced to feel different.

This is a plea to the administration to:

Implement a new building code that requires restaurants, govt. offices as well as public places to be disabled friendly (in terms of toilets, entry points, and ramps).

Mandate the presence of an ISL trained employee at restaurants, public places, and govt. offices.

Initiate the building of disabled friendly toilets throughout India.

There has always been talk about the installation of disabled friendly toilets but no action has ever been taken. We hope we can help change that and you can help us by signing this petition.

This Independence Day, free the country from the shackles of inaccessibility, and help make india physically enabled.