The State government has selected five districts, including Tiruchi, for implementing ‘TN RIGHTS’, a World Bank-funded project to strengthen the social protection systems for persons with disabilities, in the first phase.
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The project aims to help the State improve the management of services for persons with disabilities by supporting the development of a centralised registry for them, setting up social care service centres, providing mobile outreach of therapy services, improving access to public infrastructure and identifying training and livelihood opportunities
As a first step towards implementing a slew of measures and welfare assistance to persons with disabilities, the Tiruchi district administration has launched a special drive to collect data on disabled persons in all blocks, town panchayats, municipalities and Tiruchi Corporation. Volunteers from Tamil Nadu Urban Livelihood Mission (TNULM) and Tamil Nadu Rural Livelihood Mission have been roped in for the enumeration drive. They will visit each and every house to figure out the persons with disabilities.
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“The trained volunteers will meet the targetted persons individually to collect data on education, livelihood opportunities, accessibility to government welfare schemes, therapy services and others. The exercise will have complete data on disabled persons and the data will subsequently be uploaded on an App for offering better services to them,” says M. Pradeep Kumar, Collector.
He told The Hindu that the social registry would act as a one shop solution to extend welfare, financial and other services to the targetted persons. So far, more than 40,000 differently abled persons have been enumerated. The exercise would come to an end within two weeks.
Once the remuneration was completed, S. Chandramohan, District Differently Abled Welfare Officer, Tiruchi, said that the project was likely to be rolled out in the selected districts. It would be in force for six years. It would create opportunities for creating all needed infrastructure at sub divisional level. It had been planned to create one shop centre at Musiri, Vadugarpettai, Thuraiyur and Manapparai.
The Collector said that one shop centres would have facilities for physiotherapy, occupational therapies, skill training, psychological counselling and others. The beneficiaries had so far been visiting Tiruchi to avail of such services. There would be no need to visit Tiruchi to avail of such services once one shop centres were opened. The project would also create avenues for employment generation for the differently abled persons, Mr. Kumar added.