CHENNAI: The Madras High Court has directed the authorities of various departments, including transport corporations, to convene a joint meeting to come up with an action plan to address the issues relating to providing disabled friendly buses, bus shelters, toilets etc. The court also directed the authorities to file a status report and the minutes of the meeting before the court by March 12, 2019.
Passing interim orders on a batch of petitions by Rajiv Rajan and advocate L Muruganandam, a division bench comprising Justices Vineet Kothari and C V Karthikeyan said, “We are of the opinion that unless a holistic view of the entire issue is taken jointly by all the departments concerned of the state government, including the Metropolitan Transport Corporation, Chennai, the issue regarding the provision of Disabled People Friendly Buses, bus shelters, toilets around them etc., cannot be properly addressed.”
The bench said though a series of orders have been passed in several PILs by different benches of this court and different status reports have been filed from time to time, the problem of shortage and inadequacies of suitable infrastructure for disabled persons, however, continues. The infrastructure provided by the state and the corporation has fallen much short of the demand of disabled persons, for whose benefit the present PILs have been filed in this court, the bench added.
The bench said even the basic data relating to the total number of disabled persons does not appear to have been correctly estimated by the state and other authorities so far. There were no authentic figures based on census report about the total number of disabled persons in the state and in Chennai in particular, the bench pointed out.
