Courts have intervened twice and passed judgments in favour of the disabled. Yet the State government has done nothing to make their lives easy.
When differently-abled advocate R Ramasamy of Madurai moved the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court in 2008 and got a favourable judgment, the RTO failed to honour it. Justice P K Misra’s judgment in the case was a landmark one as it expanded the meaning of ‘invalid carriage’ by bringing vehicles modified in private workshops under the same category.
Misra said: “I don’t find any restriction that a normal vehicle can’t be redesigned and reconstructed specially for the use of a person suffering from disability, so that such altered vehicle can be registered as invalid carriage.’’ He also said there should be no bar on registering a vehicle as invalid carriage even if it was registered as a regular vehicle earlier.
The judgment made it clear that “there is nothing in section 2 (18) of Indian Motor Vehicle Act, 1988, which excludes the possibility of the vehicle being redesigned and reconstructed by a mechanic for a use of a person suffering from disability.’’
Yet, the government refuses to honour the order and insists on blindly following the law, which permits registration of a vehicle as an invalid carriage only if the manufacturers altered it, says Prabhu Rajadurai, an advocate at the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court.
For example, Ponniah, whose vehicle was modified by T Musthafa of Kerala, got a learner’s licence after an interim order from a court. Ponniah is not sure he would get a permanent licence. “Fearing that the RTO would create problems while going in for a permanent licence, we impleaded the Central government in the case. The idea was if the RTO fails to issue permanent licence, the court can always ask the Central government to intervene,’’ says Prabhu Rajadurai, Ponniah’s counsel.
The Centre’s 2008 notification directed the State governments to identify manufacturers of retrofitting kits and identify workshops that would modify vehicles. “But which company would manufacture them unless you give them tax exemption?” wonders Rajadurai. Such laws only delay and deny justice to the disabled, he adds.