Minister Of State For Industry Urges Corporate Sectors To Help India's Disabled Population

Problems faced by India’s physically challenged communities in getting jobs and a livelihood due to failure of the education system and proper support by the mainstream corporative sectors

The Minister of state for Industry Ashwini Kumar speaking at a national workshop on 'Disability: Mainstreaming the Marginalised', today urged the corporate sector in India to draw up a framework so to provide a better job opportunities to disabled people. It is only then can the physically challenged be helped to be brought into the mainstream, said Minister.

The government's commitment towards the community is unflinching but industry experts should draw up a framework on how to move ahead so that desired results in providing jobs to them can be achieved.

We know that just commitment won't solve the problem and we want to turn it into action trough the help of the corporate sector, Kumar said.

Though the government has envisaged a three percent reservation in jobs for the disabled, only 0.65 percent of such people have been absorbed so far.

Lack of proper training, job information and overall social acceptance are the main reasons for the problem. I hope industry bodies like Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) will help the government and tell their member industries to employ more disabled people, the minister added.

India is home to around 70 million disabled people, of which seven million are waiting to get good employment. Organisations like the Tata-owned VSNL and IBM like doing good work with disabled people and we want many more organisations to show corporate social responsibility to bring the marginalised sections in to the mainstream. T.D. Dhariyal, deputy chief commissioner for disability, said that education remains a major challenge for the physically challenged people.

While 93 percent of people of the category are below secondary level in rural India, 82 percent in urban India are below the same level. Only nine out of 1,000 physically challenged people in urban areas are into engineering as against three in rural areas.

In case of other vocational education, the ratio is 26 in urban areas as against 12 in rural areas, Dhariyal said.

source-Indo-Asian News Service