The case of Rajiv Rajan, the person with cerebral palsy, who was disallowed from boarding an aircraft, caused widespread outrage among persons with disability and activists, who demanded an unconditional apology from the airline concerned or threatened to take them to court. However, Rajiv’s case has only highlighted what is a common practice among airlines in India — discrimination against persons with disability.
Apart from those with cerebral palsy and autism, persons with visual impairment have also been stopped from boarding the flight. In many of these instances, the airline that stands accused of discriminating Rajiv, Air Sahara, has been the culprit. I myself had been a victim of their discriminatory practices.
On August 9, 2005, I was to return from Hyderabad to Bangalore, having attended a seminar. The flight (S2/309) was about to depart at 5.55 pm and, despite reaching the airport on time, I was barred from boarding the flight. The manager of the airlines at the airport told me that he can’t allow me to board the flight and he was “acting by the rules of the airline”.
He cited Air Sahara’s rule, which states that persons with disability need an escort in order to board their flights and won’t be allowed without one. Disclosing that I am a journalist, I told the manager that he must follow the rules by spirit and not merely by letter.
The manager, who earlier insisted that he would go by the rules, slackened a little and told me that he is informing the flight captain. After some frantic phone calls, he informed that the captain, who was supposedly a senior pilot, wasn’t willing to take on board a “disabled person without escort”.
As a result, despite issuing me the boarding pass, the flight departed from Hyderabad leaving me behind. The best, Air Sahara could help me was endorsing a ticket in the Indian airlines flight scheduled to leave for Bangalore the next morning (as their’s was the last flight to Bangalore for the day). That was hardly a help, because, having checked out of the room the organisers had provided me, I had virtually no place to stay. And I had no work, except waiting for the flight till the next morning.
Before I could raise the issue with the manager, my hosts were kind enough to provide me accommodation for the night. My subsequent inquiries with fellow visually challenged revealed that stopping the visually challenged from boarding the flight for not having escorts has been a common thing, which most of them had experienced regularly.
Heeru Chandnani, who now works with a multi-national company in Bangalore, had a similar experience in early 2005. Besides putting up a five-hour delay of an Air Sahara flight from Pune to Bangalore, she was stopped from boarding the flight, as the ground staff insisted visually challenged persons like her need an escort. She could board the flight at the last minute, as a co-passenger offered to act as her escort.
Incidents of a blind passenger left behind by an airlines in Katmandu airport was even reported at the general assembly of the World Blind Union in 2004-05, but making the airlines change their minds proved tougher than anyone could imagine.
Though Air Sahara was involved in a majority of the incidents, they are not alone in this practice. There are instances where others like Indian airlines and Thai Airways had disallowed visually challenged persons, according to accounts of some of my friends.
The so-called “rule” which was quoted in most of these instances, is said to be contained in the Passenger Services Resolution manual (section 1.3.2.2) of the IATA regulation. This categorises the visually challenged persons along with those on stretchers and those with severe mobility impairment and leaves them at the mercy of the commercial staff on the ground.
With most ground staff, who are new recruits by the airlines, not having even the basic information or knowledge about persons with disability, they treat us with contempt and don’t usually listen to our explanations. Creating a scene often leaves us embarrassed and doesn’t help our cause. Besides, after all our shouts, we still have to depend on the staff to either board or exit the airport, so, our options are severely limited.
Presumably, the airlines are not sure how a disabled person (not specifically blind) can be helped during emergencies. Perhaps, considering the “compensations” they may have to pay in the event of a catastrophe, they seem to feel it is better to leave behind a disabled passenger than carry him/her.
As people who are discriminated on in many places, from banks to insurance companies and at times even in trains, most of us have learnt to take it in our stride. Of course, the thought “Why should we go through all this, when we have come a long way handling our disability” does lurk somewhere in the mind.
And the greatest irony is that technology today allows the visually challenged persons to pilot flights, proved real by Miles Hilton-Barber. The visually challenged Englishman was recently in the media for piloting a flight between London and Sydney. What better proof do the airlines need, in order to allow the disabled to enjoy air travel?