In a bid to tighten the requirements for obtaining a disability certificate, the Union government on Wednesday published draft amendments to the Rules of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (RPwD Act) of 2016.
The proposed changes — including mandatory identity proof, medical authority involvement, and a longer process — come in the wake of the row over Puja Khedkar, a dismissed IAS probationer accused of faking her disability certificate, among other transgressions. Government sources told The Hindu that this controversy was among the factors considered while drafting the amendments.
The amended Rules will require people with disabilities to mandatorily submit proof of identity, a photo not older than six months, and an Aadhaar card. The draft amendments propose that only medical authorities be considered competent to receive and process applications for disability certificates, further suggesting that the time taken to process each application should be increased from one to three months.
‘Will hurt genuine applicants’
Experts and activists in the disability sector said that these proposed amendments will not do much to tackle the menace of fake disability certificates, which they argued was a result of systemic corruption. Instead, they said, the potential new Rules will make it harder for genuine applicants to get through the system.
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These amendments to the Rules governing the RPwD Act, 2016 were published by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in The Gazette of India as a draft and made public on Wednesday for objections and suggestions from members of the public. Comments must be sent to Vineet Singhal, Director, Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities within 30 days.
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Last year, the government had first made it mandatory for all PwDs to have a UDID card for availing benefits, and then made Aadhaar a requirement for all UDID cards.
While the current Rules require applicants for a disability certificate to submit only proof of residence and recent photographs, the proposed amendments make more documentation mandatory, specifying that the photos must not be older than six months, and adding the requirement for a proof of identity and an Aadhaar number (or enrolment number).
Medical authorities only
The government proposes to standardise the requirements to apply for a disability certificate and a UDID card. In subsequent amendments, the government has proposed that the applications can only be received by “a medical authority or any other notified competent medical authority” as opposed to “a medical authority or any other notified competent authority”.
Further, Rule 18 (2), which mandates the medical authority to process each application within one month of receiving it, has been proposed to be amended as follows: “The medical authority shall issue the Disability certificate and UDID card within three months, in case any disability is diagnosed.”
The government has also proposed colour-coded UDID cards for people with disabilities. The draft amendments have suggested White cards for people with below 40% disability, Yellow cards for those with disability between 40% and 80%, and Blue cards for those with more than 80% disability.
The draft amendments have also inserted a clause in Rule 18 that allows for an application to lapse or become “inactive” if the concerned medical authority is unable to decide on it for over two years - following which the applicant will have to re-apply or approach the authority to re-activate it.
Invisible disabilities
V. Muralidharan of the National Platform of the Rights of the Disabled told The Hindu, “These amendments would not help cut the corruption that leads to fake certificates, no amount of rules might help this. It will only make things unnecessarily complex and difficult for genuine applicants to obtain their disability certificates.”
He added that the colour-coding of UDID cards was another redundant proposal that will most likely add to hostility, discrimination, and harassment faced by people with disabilities. “The UDID database will have disability details of the people anyway. Why make it overt and visible? It will create a whole lot of more problems for people with ‘invisible’ disabilities such as mental illnesses,” Mr. Muralidharan said.
He also questioned why the time taken to process each application was being increased instead of being reduced, arguing that UDID applications are currently taking more than six months to be processed anyway. “I had applied for a UDID card on January 4, 2024 and am yet to get any response from the authorities,” he said.
