Delhi elections: Volunteers save day for differently-abled

NEW DELHI: Young volunteers rose to the occasion to make polling a reasonably comfortable experience for the wheelchair-bound and ageing voters. The capital has taken the lead in making elections accessible, but a visit to some polling stations revealed the distance yet to be travelled to make elections disabled- and age-friendly.
It is no surprise that the polling centre at the Leprosy Complex in northeast Delhi’s Tahirpur area would have a high number of voters who suffer from leprosy and are wheelchair-bound.Volunteers didn’t have a moment to breathe as they wheeled-in one voter after another, hampered by insufficient numbers of wheelchairs and one even non-functional.
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“Given the centre’s location, there should have been large numbers of wheelchairs and volunteers. We feel bad since there are only so many voters we can help at a time,” said a volunteer who didn’t wish to be identified. “One wheelchair is damaged, making our jobs tougher,” he said.
“I don’t have a leg and I have been in queue for over an hour. There should be some special facilities for us so that we don’t have to stand for so long in queues,” said Rehman (40), a resident of the complex. Phool Chand (35), who has lost his fingers and legs to leprosy, sat on the floor helpless, waiting for the crowd to thin so he could crawl his way into the booth. “Volunteers are all busy, there is no one to help me and I don’t know how long I will have to wait,”he said, watching the few volunteers running around.
In RK Puram, too it was left to the volunteers who had to compensate for the lack of a ramp at a booth. Disabled voters had to be aided to climb a few stairs before they could be ferried on wheelchairs.
A 65-year-old man with a fractured leg spoke highly of the volunteers in his Laxmi Nagar booth. “I was undecided about going to vote, but my family helped me go. And volunteers immediately helped once I reached, taking me in a wheelchair to the booth.”
Across the city in Madangir, Poonam Devi, partially paralysed for five years, was helped by her husband Laxmi Narayan to reach her poll station. Her speech impaired, she was helped as she walked to the booth and cast her vote. The election commission had earlier announced a pick-and-drop facility for ageing voters who had no one to bring them to polling booths.