CHENNAI: THE Department of Welfare of Differently-Abled Persons, in collaboration with the State Development Policy Council, embarked on a mission to provide employment and livelihood opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (PwD). As many as 145 candidates have already been placed.
“This is one of the pressing issues that we wanted to address since long. For this purpose, we have collaborated with an NGO called ‘We Are Your Voice’. The project is being implemented in 50 underdeveloped blocks at 13 districts in the State,” said an official from the Department of Welfare of Differently Abled.
Under the project, the NGO finds employers from the surrounding districts and mobilises PwD through a help desk set up in Chennai and gets them employed. “We primarily focus on sensitising the employers about hiring disabled persons as per the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (RPwD), 2016, and influence them to create job vacancies, taking into considering the accessibility and other aspects of PwD hiring.
We began scouting for employers in August this year,” said Kasim Basith, founder, We Are Your Voice. Since the onset of the project, more than 1,000 employers have been found and 145 PwDs are placed. This includes six persons with intellectual disability. Some of the districts where the project is implemented includes Dindigul, Madurai, Pudukkottai, Perambalur, Salem, Tenkasi, etc.
“We reach out to the PwDs through various channels like profiling by help desk, block visits by project officers and mobilisation of candidates for interviews to understand their background and expertise,” said Basith.
He further added that the NGO has an application in its name, through which they connect the employer and employee. The employers post about vacancies in the app, which will be notified to the PwDs from the respective districts. The employers range from different areas of work, including photography studio, hospitals, departmental stores, manufacturing industries, mills, bakeries, cloth stores among others.