Differently-abled people

Delay marks functioning of the officialdom in Pakistan. A petition was filed by representatives of differently-abled people in the Supreme Court in 2015 and the top court has been issuing orders on a regular basis for governments and others concerned to provide necessary facilities to the handicapped to facilitate them, yet not much has been done in this regard. Even the data on the number of the special people is not available, so a three-member bench of the Supreme Court, presided over by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Justice Gulzar Ahmed, recently ordered the authorities to release the data on the relevant website as this could help give a proper idea as to what facilities such people had been provided with and to what extent. Justice Ijazul Ahsan said the court had issued various orders since 2015 telling the authorities to provide the required facilities to the special people in transport, hospitals and buildings. “Individual complainants can go to the relevant forum from now onwards” for provision of such facilities wherever they were not available.

The petitioners’ lawyers said there were many things that needed to be done with regard to facilities, so the court should not close the case at this stage. He said the federal government did not have proper statistics on people with disabilities. The Chief Justice asked an additional attorney general about this. The law officer said a data had been gathered through a survey. The CJP ordered that the statistics should be put on the relevant website, saying the actual number of special people could only be known after the census. This shows that in the 2016 census the differently-abled were not counted. A law officer of the Sindh government said the provincial government had fixed a 5% quota for special people in government jobs while the Centre has reserved 1% jobs for such people. He said this had left officials confused as to which quota should be followed.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 16^th, 2020.

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