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Senior citizens rue lack of amenities

Help desks for the differently abled were also seen empty.

Hyderabad: Senior citizens and differently-abled voters complained of inadequate facilities at polling booths on Friday. Some polling booths had wheelchairs but no one to attend to them. There were no separate queues in some booths for senior citizens and persons with disabilities and they had to join the general queue and wait for hours.

Mr Mohan Guruswamy, a senior citizen from Yapral, said, “The Telangana government is on a publicity binge about providing wheelchairs at every booth. So I was emboldened to go. But at the ZP School at Yapral, I discovered the wheelchair was more for display than use. It was positioned on a raised platform in front of the booths. There were no attendants. So I had to limp the 50 metres or so from the gate.”

He added that the booth — “the sanctum sanctorum of our democracy,” he called it — was badly lit and he could hardly see the symbols, not to speak of being able to read the names of the candidates.

A source said volunteers at the Government Junior College in Wanaparthy were seen sitting on wheelchairs. Help desks for the differently abled were also seen empty.

( Source : Deccan Chronicle. )
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