BENGALURU: Eight spots on Church Street have been made disabled friendly, thus bringing smiles on the faces of physically challenged individuals. An initiative by Prateek Khandelwal, a wheelchair-bound person, noticed that Church Street wasn’t friendly to disabled people and even spotted a few of them struggling to move around. This led him to set up ramps at some places and making them accessible to disabled persons.
Khandelwal’s startup, RampMyCity, founded in 2018, provides infrastructure like bars or ramps to help disabled people move around the city without any hassle. Based on his startup, he thought of setting up ramps at Church Street, where there is frequent movement of people. The spots that were made accessible by adding the ramps are, Brigade Gardens, Amoeba Bowling, Ebony, Bheemas, Social, MSR West Park building giving access to HDFC Bank and Gangarams Book Store, Pizza Bakery, and 1 Sobha Mall.
Khandelwal said, “Just like every individual, hundreds of wheel chair users can now make use of the ramp and visit these spots. After getting permission from building owners and associations, we set up the ramp.” He explained that to fix the ramps, no alteration is required. “All it needs is to be placed at the spot. Many people feel that it is problematic to set up such disabled friendly ramps as they need to make civic alterations, so they do not add such ramps. But the ramps we provide, are easily flexible and there is no requirement of demolishing or rebuilding anything.”
In 2014, Khandelwal met with an accident which later made him wheelchair-bound. He then realised that not many places were accessible to him. Determined to bring in the change, he established RampMyCity project.