The Delhi high court Tuesday sought the Centre’s stand on a public interest litigation plea seeking a direction to affix quick response (QR) code on medicines, food products and cosmetics to make them accessible to visually impaired people.
A division bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad issued notice to the Centre through the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities) and Food Safety and Standards Authority of India in a PIL moved by The Kapila & Nirmal Hingorani Foundation, a public charitable trust and two visually impaired Delhi University professors. The matter is next listed on August 16.
The plea claimed that visually impaired people face immense difficulties in taking medicines and they feel the shape and size of tablets and do not even have the benefit of differentiating drugs based on colour.
Due to a lack of accessible information, visually impaired people may take wrong medicines, leading to major health problems, adverse reactions and even loss of life, the PIL submitted.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the petitioners Dr Smriti Singh, associate professor (English) at Maitreyi College; and Shobhan Singh, senior assistant professor (History) Zakir Hussain PG Evening College, who are visually impaired, went through a horrible time, desperate for help and information.
The plea stated that the scope for utilising the capabilities of smartphones with QR codes to help visually impaired persons identify products and access all relevant product information is huge. “It was reported in the press that India had 1.2 billion mobile subscribers in 2021, of which about 750 million were smartphone users. Furthermore, the number of smartphone users was expected to increase to 1 billion by 2026, with rural areas driving the sale of internet-enabled phones, which in turn were set to get a push with the government’s plan to fiberise all villages by 2025 under the BharatNet Programme,” the PIL stated.
The petitioners sent a representation in December 2021 and a follow-up in February 2022 to the Prime Minister of India and another representation to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on February 21, 2022.
The representation of the petitioners urged that all medicine manufacturers be directed to affix QR code on each tablet (or at the very least between two tablets) at the back of the strip so that a smartphone with accessibility feature could then scan the QR code with its stored data or information about the particular medicine, and decode it to convert the text to speech format of the application.
The PIL claimed that petitioners, on learning that some medicines in the market did have QR Codes (without full information/details of the medicine), also made follow-up representations. The plea stated that employing QR Codes in the manner suggested in the representations would increase the efficacy of medical care for visually impaired patients by reducing medication errors, incorrect dosages, unintended drug interactions and side effects.
The plea asserted that the continued lack of effective access to medicines, food, cosmetics and other consumer products constitutes a “denial of the constitutional rights of visually impaired persons under Article 21 of the Constitution” as well as their “statutory rights” under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.
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