SUGAMYA BHARAT ABHIYAAN

Introduction

Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has launched an initiative called Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan (also called Accessible India Campaign) on 3rd of December in 2015 at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi. It was launched especially at International Day of Persons with Disabilities which is annually being celebrated all over the world on 3rd December. This is an active effort made by the Indian government to make India more friendly and accessible for differently abled people. The sole objective of this abhiyan is to empower disabled people all across the country for their career growth and economic growth.

Objectives and Action Plan of Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan

Following are the objectives of this campaign:

• It aims to make government buildings, offices, public space, tourist places, transport, railway stations, airports, information and communication technologies, etc disabled friendly in the country.


• It aims to create barrier-free environment all over the country to attain universal accessibility for disabled people.


• It emphasizes to provide equal opportunities to disabled to life independent life.

• It aims to call all the disabled people of the country to participate in each aspects of life to make their lives easy, safe, productive, and dignified.


• It aims to spread awareness about this programme among builders and activists through an expert team.


• It aims to establish a special university having special courses by the Indian government for disabled people.


• It aims to offer free motorized tricycles to the persons having around 70-90% disability by the ministry of social justice and empowerment.


• It aims to renovate around 50-100 public buildings by each state for the persons with disabilities.


• It aims to make more public buildings in 50 Indian cities by 2016.

Action plan of this campaign is:

The main target of this campaign is to built-up friendly environment, information and communication eco-system, and transportation eco-system. In order to spread awareness among people, it will make use of information technologies, social media and other online tools. There is plan to convert citizen-centric public websites into disabled friendly. It has also planned to create accessible hospitals, police stations, tourism, etc through the collaboration of Ministry of Home, Family Welfare and Ministry of Tourism, and Ministry of Health. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting will work to enhance accessibility to television broadcasts.

Conclusion

Including this campaign there are various other campaigns launched by the Modi government. Most of them have their time limit to be completed by next 5 years. This campaign is also set to be completed by next 5 years. This campaign has aimed to make available universal accessibility, accessibility rights and independent living for the people with disabilities. As we have seen the positive responses of already launched campaigns, there is no doubt about the success of this campaign. It will really make disabled people of the society more accessible to the basic facilities and independent. They can make their life better as well as contribute to the economic growth of country without being a burden to the family or society.