Friday, 4 December 2009, 2:31 pm | 238 views
Ravi Philemon
I was the
media spokesperson for CAN!’s campaign for transport subsidy for
people with disability.
CAN!’s petition signing and awareness raising campaign ended in
May 2009. Since then, they have been trying to deliver the petition
which was signed by 377 people. Both people who are able-bodied and
people with disability.
They tried to deliver the petition through REACH after all they are supposed to
be Reach everyone for Active Citizenry @ Home; and were to connect
them to the relevant government agencies.
REACH however claimed that they did not receive the first email
sent, asking them to connect CAN! with the Transport Ministry and
then they replied to the second email, saying that they will try
and make the second connection. Their subsequent email came about 2
weeks later (at the end of June 2009), asking CAN! to scan and send
the petition to the Ministry of Transport.
But how can a poor, resource-less, informal group of people with
disability like CAN!, scan a 25-page petition (with signatures) to
the Transport Minister?
Then, the group got together and deliberated how else they could
send the petition to the ministry. A few ideas were discussed. They
even thought of meeting the Transport Minister through his
Meet-the-People Session, but decided against it as they thought
that it ‘would not be the right thing to do’.
Finally in September, they wrote another email direct to the
transport minister. The reply came about 14 days later, not from
the Transport Minister, but from some official from the ministry
asking CAN! to submit the petition to the public transport
operators.
CAN! got together again. “But why should we submit the petition
to the public transport operators?” they wondered. “They are
responsible to their shareholders and not to the people who elected
them – even the people with disability”.
Finally, they decided to deliver an open petition to the Public
Transport Council (PTC), copied to the Transport Ministry, and the
public transport operators, through a press conference.
When the media tried to contact the
PTC on this, they replied
that they did not administer “any form of public transport
subsidy”.
So, the transport ministry washes their hands-off from the
issue, the PTC says they don’t know anything about it, which brings
the people with disability back to being at the mercy of the public
transport operators.
Which brings me back to the original question, “why should the
public transport operators consider any request for subsidy from
the members of the public (even disabled members of the public),
when they are only responsible to their shareholders?”
Would the people with disability have to wait for 10 more years,
for the public transport operators to explore if they should be
given a subsidy or not?
