Robbing the disabled

Various quarters within Pakistan as well as abroad have strongly condemned the government’s decision to abolish the 2% public and private company employment quota for persons living with disabilities (PLWDs). This was done by deleting Section 459 of the Companies Act 2017 through a presidential ordinance in May.

One can only wonder what the logic of this move is. While the Secretary of the Ministry of Human Rights has said that the deletion of this section from the Companies Act would not jeopardise the job quota guarantee, a legal cover to employment of PLWDs has been taken away from them.

The decision is harsh and inhumane, and it comes as a surprise that no one objected while it was being made. This will affect many who are the sole breadwinners for their families. Removal of the quota is a violation of the disabled persons’ right to employment. The irony is this: the state that is supposed to protect the most vulnerable segments of society has decided to not care for them.

We are not willing to give accurate numbers of our disabled population. According to a report published by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2014, estimates of the number of persons living with disabilities vary between 3.3 million and 27 million, depending on whether they are based on government statistics or whether they come from other agencies.

The fifth Population and Housing Census conducted in 1998 identified the population of Persons with Disabilities in Pakistan to be 2.38% of the entire population. However, as per the sixth Population and Housing Census of 2017, the percentage has gone down to less than 0.48%. This simply defies logic.

The reported decline in the population percentage raised concerns in many circles including the Supreme Court of Pakistan. If it were not for the Supreme Court’s intervention, the disability question would not even be made part of the survey at a later stage. Finally, the government itself accepted that the census might not have been thorough and that that there was a possibility that the number of transgender and disabled persons had not been shown in complete detail.

Some stakeholders also follow the figure of 15% identified by the World Health Organization. As per WHO, “About 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability.” In 2011, the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund undertook a comprehensive survey of 23 union councils in seven districts of Pakistan, comprising 78,939 households, and found the disability prevalence rate to be around 12%, of which 2% had severe disabilities.

In the past, according to the EIU report, Pakistan did make early attempts at including persons with disabilities in the 1980s with the introduction of education and employment policies, setting up special schools for persons with disabilities, for example, and mandating businesses to employ persons with disabilities through a quota-based system and levies.

While these were celebrated achievements in the early years, they proved to be ineffective. Today persons with disabilities still have difficulty exercising their civil and political rights, attending quality schools and finding gainful employment.

What is ironic is that the latest move was made barely four months after the National Assembly passed the ICT Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill 2020, a bill in which the Minister for Human Rights took special interest.

Despite ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011, Pakistan has made little to no progress to help bring these citizens into the mainstream fold through inclusive policies in every sphere and at every level of government.

It is criminal that persons living with disabilities should be stripped of this protection. The government is a state party to the Convention on the Rights of PWDs and is therefore bound to comply with all its provisions on work and employment for PLWDs. The government needs to reverse its decision on the job quota immediately and focus on providing fairer, better labour protection to PLWDs.

While we have seen legislative efforts at both federal and provincial levels on the issue of disability rights, implementation remains the real challenge. Campaigners fear other organisations will follow suit and it will increase exclusionary practices for the PLWDs who already face discriminatory behaviour at all levels. Let us move to protect our most vulnerable.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 22^nd, 2020.

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