Mr. Pincha issued directions in this regard to Chief Secretary S.V. Ranganath and other top-ranking officials concerned during his two-day review of the implementation of welfare measures for persons with disabilities by the State Government.

Disclosing this at a press conference here after completing the review on Sunday, Mr. Pincha, who is a visually challenged person, pointed out that though the Act had come into force in 1996, Karnataka commenced the process of reservation only in 2002. Though the Act had specified that reservation should be provided to persons with disabilities in all the four — A, B, C and D — categories of posts, Karnataka had identified posts for reservation only in C and D categories. All the categories of posts were taken up for reservation by Karnataka only from 2005, he said.

Taking exception to this, he wondered: “Who under the sun was responsible for such a lapse and what action would be taken against those responsible for the delay in providing reservation to persons with disabilities?”

He directed the State Government to immediately fill all the backlog of vacancies.

A representative from the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms had expressed inability to provide reservation from retrospective effect citing technical reasons and had said that the Government would continue to provide reservation with prospective effect, he said. However, the Chief Secretary had told Mr. Pincha to send guidelines in this regard so that the Government could examine them.

He said the condition of special schools for persons with disabilities was very bad.

Concern

He expressed concern over the fact that only three of the 30 districts in the State had independent disability welfare officers, and termed this as a casual, cosmetic and adhoc way of dealing with disability welfare.

He took exception to the State co-ordination and executive committees on disability welfare never meeting after 2009 though these apex committees were supposed to meet two and four times a year respectively.

Pointing out that the Act mandated the State Commissioner for Disabilities to submit a report on the activities of his department to the State Government, which was supposed to table this report along with the Action Taken Report before the State Legislature, he said none of the reports by the Commissioner had been tabled before the State Legislature.

Listing the positives, he hailed Karnataka as one of the leading States in the south after Tamil Nadu in implementation of welfare measures for persons with disabilities. He pointed out that Karnataka Chief Secretary had told him that the State had not only reserved 5 per cent of jobs for persons with disabilities, but also extended the facility even to mentally challenged persons. “But they do not have any statistics on the actual number of jobs reserved,” he said.