The Central government has come up with a set of draft guidelines on providing certain facilities to its employees with disabilities to help them perform their duties efficiently.
The guidelines, released on Monday, include proposals such as preferences in transfers, postings and accommodation, reimbursement for assistive devices and special casual leave. Additionally, all ministries and departments, subordinate offices, PSUs, government companies, and cantonment boards would also have to identify the type of jobs that such employees may easily perform.
As far as possible, persons with disabilities will be exempted from rotational transfer and will be allowed to continue in the same job where they would have achieved the desired performance. Preference in place of posting at the time of transfer or promotion may be given to the persons with disability.
The induction training — an essential component of an employee’s service requirement — of all employees should take place together. Job-specific post-recruitment and pre- promotion training programmes are required to be organised for persons with disabilities.
The guidelines instruct ministries and departments to provide or reimburse, within a specific time frame, the cost of special assistive devices in accordance with the prices fixed by them in consultation with various national institutes specialising in disability care.
