Hyderabad: Ramp fighter’ Kruthi Beesam, 27, a proof reading specialist, is pushing the legislature and GHMC to have disable-friendly polling stations. Her fight for ramps forced Osmania University to install them. Her corporate office has installed one too. Kruthi, from Punjagutta, is 100 per cent disabled due to a damage caused to her brain at her birth.
Sharing her journey, she said, “I was born as one of the twins. My sister’s name is Shruti. I was delivered with the umbilical cord around the neck, which prevented oxygen from reaching the brain. Doctors said I turned blue and did not cry like normal infants do.”
The medical team provided me with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and I was put in an incubator for 11 days, she adds.
“My parents found out about the problem when I was three months’ old. Since then I started surgeries and physiotherapy. At the age of six, I was taken abroad for treatment. This trip transformed me,” says Kruthi.
At the age eight, I attended Montessori school and then I was promoted to the third grade and I continued regularly from then. My school built a ramp for me to make it easy for me to access classes, since then I have been used to using the ramp for accessibility, she adds
Kruthi recalled that while pursing her 11th and 12th standard at Nasr School, she was allowed to use the staff lifts to reach her classrooms.
In the recent past, Kruthi met a few city legislatures, seeking ramps to be built or makeshift arrangements to be made at all polling booths (Greater Hyderabad has around 500-plus polling booths). The petition has been forwarded to the Chief Election Commissioner to ensure that booths have ramps to help physically handicapped and senior citizens to exercise their voting rights without much difficulty.
The job to build a ramp will lie with the GHMC. The municipal corporation says each ramp would entail a cost of '1,000 and could also be easily dismantled after the polling day. The civic body’s design involves the use of sand bags and shahbaad stones that could be installed in a few hours and at a reasonable cost. A brick masonry ramp, on the other hand, would cost '3,000 each, senior engineering officials said.
A GHMC chief engineer said the ramp would have around 30 sand bags arranged with required gradient and topped with stones so that a wheelchair could pass comfortably on it.
