E-Dialogues
Accessibility: A mere idealistic cause or a substantive one? All India Institute of Local Self-Government, in association with the Building Accessible Safe Inclusive Indian Cities(BASIIC) Program implemented by the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) and supported by Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office(FCDO), organised an E-Dialogue titled “Building Cities for All – A perspective on disability inclusion in urban development” on 31st January, 2022 he eminent panel was comprised of Hitesh Vaidya, Director, NIUA; Harpreet Arora, FCDO; Dr Vasudevan, Chief General Manager, Varanasi Smart City; Divya Pillai, Consultant, Bhopal Smart City; Prateek Khandelwal, Founder, RampMyCity; Subhash Chandra Vashishth, Co-founder and Director, Centre for Accessibility in Built Environment Foundation; Utsav Chaudhary, Team Leader (BASIIC), NIUA; and Ravi Ranjan Guru, Deputy Director General, AIILSG. The e-dialogue commenced with the
44 February 2022 | www.urbanupdate.in
address from Abhishek Pandey. The main objective of the webinar circled around the differently abled people and that our cities are not inclusive in their context. Stating facts, Pandey mentioned that with 6.5 billion estimated to be urban dwellers by 2050 globally and 900 million in India, inclusivity will be a huge task to cater to. Approximately 15 per cent people living in the cities are differently abled. Leading to the urgency to the UN’s declaration, a poor accessibility presents a major challenge. “We aspire to have a better lifestyle, better economic conditions, and our aspirations leads us to migrate from villages to towns and then towns to cities,” Pandey added. The population hike in the coming years is a given and so are the problems for the differently abled. Be it access to public servicesor access to public infrastructure the battle remains the same. So as we celebrate 75 years of independence, we need to be more focused towards catering to the demands of the differently abled and make cities more inclusive for them and not just for the people who can navigate and who are capable. Hitesh Vaidya, who was present for an inaugural address said that cities are engines of economic growth, if they are being supported by the pillars of inclusion and sustainability. “Moving ahead in time, we are not left with just one engine, we have triple engine strategies for progress. There is no point of having the solutions written unless we start talking about them in the air,” he said. NIUA has developed policy briefs, tools, and also come out with harmonised guidelines that are the draft guidelines which will be now notified soon after the stakeholder discussion and they will entail information on how to capacitate the states and cities and how to bring inclusion in drafting the cities, he added. The next speaker, Harpreet Arora spoke on Improving diversity and Inclusion in Indian cities and role of FCDO. Becoming inclusive is to include people from all ages and categories. FCDO’s perspective lies in localising all the efforts. “Aspects
