Persons with physical and mental disabilities: President for creating enabling environment

ISLAMABAD: President Dr Arif Alvi has reemphasized the need for making accelerated nationwide efforts to create an enabling environment and ensuring all-inclusive participation of persons with physical and mental disabilities in all spheres of society as dignified and respected members.

The president expressed these views while chairing a meeting on the facilitation of persons with disabilities (PWDs), at Aiwan-e-Sadr, on Friday.

The meeting was attended by Minister for Zakat, Ushr, Social Welfare, Special Education and Women Empowerment Department of KP, Anwar Zeb Khan, Special Assistant to Chief Minister Sindh for the Department of Empowerment of DAP, Chairman NADRA, Muhammad Tariq Malik, senior officials of the Federal Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination, Social Welfare Departments of Punjab, Sindh, KP, Balochistan, Elementary and Secondary Education Department of AJK, Labour and Human Resource Development Department of Punjab, and representatives of NAVTTC, Pakistan Baitul Mal, Directorate of Special Education, Islamabad, NIRM, WHO, and NADRA.

Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan Khalid Khursheed Khan also attended the meeting through video-link.

During the meeting, the president asked the Federal Ministry of Education and Professional Training (FEPT) to provide a lead role and come up with a proposal on national curricula for providing targeted and quality education and market-oriented skills to differently-abled people (DAPs) in a systematic manner in consultation with all stakeholders including provinces, international organizations, NGOs and private sector to provide a definite and agreed upon world class direction for our educational institutions both at the public and private sectors besides determining teacher to differently-abled students ratio in schools.

He also emphasized enlisting of skills which could be imparted to DAP’s keeping in view their disability which may also include sign language, braille, software development, setting of businesses and selling the products and services online besides creating a repository of DAP-compliant material containing SOPs, skill enlistment, disability-specific reading, research and reference material and should be made accessible to DAPs around the country.

He underlined the need to develop an accelerated system for the mass registration of PWDs around Pakistan so that definite data could be obtained for planning and other interventions.

The president appreciated NADRA for its outreach for the registration of DAPs across the country and emphasized that NADRA should introduce a nationwide user-friendly telephonic information and registration system for DAPs and their family members to create data on location and nature of disability and later with the help of the relevant departments issue them Disability Cards while ensuring maximum facilitations to DAPs. The data so created would help the government(s) to develop authentic and meaningful policies, strategies and actions plan for mainstreaming of DAPs as full and dignified members of the society. He emphasised developing out-of-the-box solutions for complete registration of PWDs as the number of currently registered persons with NADRA around 600,000 was low as compared to the estimated number of DAPs in Pakistan which may exceed 20 million.

The president emphasized consultation by provinces, NGOs, private sector, NAVTTC, TEVTA, Chamber of Commerce and industry other stakeholders with International Labour Organization (ILO) and other relevant international entities to seek their knowledge and expertise to fine tune our database, develop world-class curricula, enlistment of disability relevant skills, adopt world best practices for mainstreaming of DAPS, barrier free movement of DAPs, providing them assistive technologies and world-class synthetic body parts, enacting new laws and improving the existing one and fulfilling the quota of the DAPs jobs.

He said that a comprehensive and all-inclusive media campaign involving social and conventional media should be launched to impart education and information to DAPs with respect to their rights and to educate the family members, the neighbourhood and the general society regarding their responsibilities and obligations towards DAPs after setting in place DAPs-oriented and responsive systems like DAPs mapping in different areas with regard to their disability and skill level, the enlist of advantages and incentives offered them, and concrete employment opportunities open to them in the public and private sectors.

He said that all government and private sector organizations were duty-bound to provide jobs to DAPs as per quota which ranged from two-five per cent by creating disability-specific gainful and productive jobs. He said that the charity-based employment approach should be discouraged as such employment did not give dignity and honour to the employees and also created no value for the organizations.

The participants of the meeting suggested different solutions for mainstreaming of DAPs. The President proposed that next meeting should be held in three months’ timeline to take stock of the decisions already made, review progress and to further sharpen and fine tune the future course of action to ensure mainstreaming of DAPs in all aspect of life in an accelerated but meaningful and quantifiable manner.

While outlining the facilities provided by NADRA for PWDs, Chairman NADRA said that all PWDs were being issued executive category CNICs with the international disability logo with lifetime validity on top priority without requiring them to wait in queues. He said that NADRA had also created biker services to provide registration services at the doorsteps of PWDs. He said that children of ages 9-18 years were being issued juvenile cards whereas NADRA had also recruited PWDs who have successfully completed the compiling of the list of 121 million voters.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023