Set up learning disability centres in each district: HC

In court | At present, children from across the state have to travel long distances to only three centres in Mumbai and one in Pune

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday directed the state government to set up special centres to help students with learning disability to get their certificates and assessment done. The court told the state to set up one such centre in each district.

A division bench of Chief Justice Mohit Shah and Justice AK Menon has formed an expert committee comprising doctors of KEM hospital, BYL Nair hospital, Dr Harish Shetty, and the Directors of the Medical Education Research and Public Health departments to provide technical assistance to the state for setting up these centres.

At the moment there are only four centres, three in Mumbai and one in Pune; in other places, learning disability assessment and certificate issuance is the work of civil surgeons.

Speaking before the court, Dr Shetty said that children have to travel from far off places and stay overnight to get certificates from the existing centres. As per government data last year, there were around 37,358 students in schools suffering from learning disability.

The Union Ministry of Social Justice has introduced a Bill in the Rajya Sabha, adding 12 more entries- one of which is learning disability- to the list of disabilities.

Now, the court has also issued instructions to the Expert Committee of the Union Ministry of Social Justice to devise a method to assess learning disability. This disability cannot be measured in terms of percentage of severity like other disabilities, experts say. Either a child is learning disabled or not, they explain.

The court has asked the Union government to refer the matter to experts.

In a related development, the court has directed the SSC and HSC exam boards to provide writers to students with learning disabilities who will take the repeaters’ exams to be held in October.

The directions were given during the hearing of a suo-moto petition based on a letter written by Dr Harish Shetty and Dr Sanghnaik Meshram, highlighting the difficulties faced by learning-disabled students.

Source | Daily News Analysis | 23 July 2015