THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, OCTOBER 19, 2021
A disability certificate is mandatory for people with disabilities to get government benefits.
The Samagra Shiksha’s Thiruvananthapuram district project is piloting medical board certificate camps where children are being provided with digital disability certificates.
The Samagra Shiksha’s Thiruvananthapuram district project is piloting medical board certificate camps where children are being provided with digital disability certificates.
Along with the digital certificates, centralised UDID cards (unique disability ID cards) are also being provided to students, including those to whom disability certificates had been issued earlier.
This follows the Union Government making it mandatory for certificate of disability to be issued online with effect from June 1 this year. This allows pan-India validity of the certificates.
A disability certificate is mandatory for people with disabilities to get government benefits, grants, and insurance such as Niramaya. During COVID-19, medical boards were not being constituted, and children faced a lot of difficulties in getting disability certificates.
Five camps have been held so far in the district through the 12 block resource centres of the Samagra Shiksha for differently abled students studying in government and aided schools. Eighty-nine digital certificates and 385 UDID cards have been handed over in the camps that began in August. Seven more camps will be held by October 29 in which 420 children with locomotor disability, intellectual disability, and those who are hearing impaired are expected to participate.
Children in need of assistive devices such as hearing aid or wheelchairs, allowances, therapies, and academic support under Samagra’s various projects are also identified at these camps.
The District Medical Officer constitutes the disability boards for each of the Samagra’s camps. The boards are chaired by superintendents of district or taluk hospitals in the district and comprise doctors, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, physical medicine and rehabilitation doctors, orthopaedicians, and audiologists from various hospitals and the Peroorkada Mental Health Centre, National Institute of Speech and Hearing, and Institute for Communicative and Cognitive Neuro Sciences.
The Kerala Social Security Mission’s UDID wing is in charge of the UDID card distribution. Nearly 260 special educators are involved in identifying the differently abled children in schools through a survey, getting them to participate in the camps, and collecting their UDID details.
These details are uploaded on the UDID portal—swavlambancard.gov.in—to generate the disability certificate and get the UDID cards after due process.
Another advantage is that with the conduct of these camps through the Samagra Shiksha, government and aided school students registered on the UDID portal do not have to visit hospitals on days the medical boards are constituted as per their enrolment number.
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