Hyderabad: With the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections just around the corner, a disability rights group has called out the “glaring democratic blind spot” of the complete absence of persons with disabilities in the city’s municipal body.
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (VOTPA) has written to Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy, who also holds the Municipal Administration and Urban Development (MA&UD) portfolio, and GHMC Commissioner RV Karnan, demanding mandatory political representation for the community, not just in the GHMC but also in other urban local bodies.
Given that people with disabilities make up a sizeable chunk of Hyderabad‘s population, the organisation said, their continued exclusion from civic decision-making is “simply indefensible.”
The group’s demands are that it wants at least two PWD representatives – a man and a woman – to be co-opted into the GHMC Council. “These members will serve as subject-matter experts to ensure all municipal infrastructure, road-building and civic policies are 100 percent disabled-friendly,” read the letter.
VOTPA has also pushed for a minimum four per cent horizontal reservation across wards, and a fixed share of the GHMC’s annual budget to be earmarked exclusively for disability welfare in the city.
‘A historic democratic injustice’
“It is a historic democratic injustice,” the letter states. “With no representation, urban planning, infrastructure, and municipal policies consistently fail to address the accessibility and survival needs of disabled citizens.”
The group also argued that political empowerment is the only real empowerment. “Such measures would help set a national benchmark for inclusive democracy,” the letter said.
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