A public interest litigation (PIL) petition has been filed in the Madras High Court complaining that the State government had been procuring and supplying substandard and defective battery-operated wheelchairs since 2015 to those suffering from muscular dystrophy and tetraplegia.
The case filed by Spinal Injured Persons Association, a registered body, has been listed for admission before Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice P.D. Audikesavalu on Monday. The association wants the government restrained from procuring the wheelchairs without conducting quality check.
In an affidavit filed through its counsel E. Vijay Anand, the association president D. Gnana Bharathi said the government had introduced the scheme of supplying battery operated wheelchairs in 2015. Since then, a private company based in Bengaluru had been bagging the contract periodically.
Quality check
Alleging that the wheelchairs were not of good quality and there was no mechanism in place to conduct a quality check, the litigant said the beneficiaries of the scheme were also finding it difficult to get the wheelchairs repaired since the company had not established proper service centres.
Though these issues were brought to the notice of the Commissioner for the Welfare of the Differently Abled, the government continued to procure the wheelchairs from the same manufacturer and there did not appear to be an end to the woes faced by the differently abled, the litigant association lamented.
Further, it was brought to the notice of the court that people suffering from spinal cord problems could be categorised into two. Those who suffer from disability in the cervical region and those suffering disability in thoracic and lumbar region. While the first category required wheelchairs, the second would require scooters.
Nevertheless, without giving attention to the specific needs of the different categories, the government had been uniformly distributing wheelchairs, the association said and insisted upon constituting an expert body for better implementation of the schemes.
The association also sought a direction to the government and the private company to take back all wheelchairs that had been supplied already, conduct a complete overhaul and then hand them over with life time warranty. It also sought monetary compensation for the mental agony undergone due to use of substandard wheelchairs.
