The central government has decided to make each of its 6,000 websites disabled-friendly. Under new government guidelines, the visually challenged will be able to use a “screen reader software” that will read out the text that appears on a computer monitor. People who have difficulty handling a mouse can use the “voice recognition software” to work the computer with verbal commands. The websites will provide features like “iconic learning” for those...

The Centre is veering round to accepting the N C Saxena committee’s methodology for identifying below poverty line (BPL) families through a census but may go in for a crucial change — replace ‘‘Muslim’’ with ‘‘minority’’ for extra weightage on poverty index. The Union rural development ministry is considering minorities as a whole, in place of only Muslims, who are to be given an extra point weightage in BPL identification....

The Union Cabinet on Thursday decided to amend the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, (RTE) to make it more disabled-friendly by including children with autism, cerebral palsy and multiple disabilities within its ambit. This has been a pending demand of the disability sector which was up in arms in August this year over Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry confining the provision mandating that schools...

Introduction The phenomenon of disability is one of the pressing problems in the world. According to the projections of international agencies, about 10 per cent of the population are affected with physical, mental, sensory and other forms of impairments and around 75 per cent of the disabled population are concentrated in the rural and inaccessible areas of the developing societies. This data is based on recent studies carried out in various...

In a year of sparse rains and spiralling food prices, with hundreds of districts being officially declared as drought-hit, a rally by activists in the capital demands a Food Entitlements Act.  Perhaps the most vocal demands at the rally were those aimed at a complete revamp of the Public Distribution System (PDS), starting with universal — instead of targeted — coverage. Over 5,000 grassroots activists, agricultural workers, farmers, lawyers, doctors and...