Law on pet assistance for disabled on cards

The draft of the proposed Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2011, was submitted to Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Mukul Wasnik last week. The Bill provides for establishing training facilities for animals like dog, cat and monkeys to ensure their easy availability to the disabled persons. The law also provides for allowing such animals to accompany disables without paying any charge. A National Disability Rights Authority is to be established to regulate service animal training.

The new law gives state governments the power to set up training facilities for animals, dogs or cats—to assist and guide the blind and deaf or monkeys to help quadriplegics with their daily chores.

The law also mandates that the state governments shall permit and facilitate use of service animals by persons with disabilities on roads, buildings, all transport systems and public facilities. In America, where the concept of service animals has evolved, the service animals have been defined as “animals trained to perform tasks for disables”.

 “Service animals are animals that are individually trained to perform tasks for people with disabilities such as guiding people who are blind, alerting people who are deaf, pulling wheelchairs, alerting and protecting a person who is having a seizure, or performing other special tasks. Service animals are working animals and not pets,” states the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The new legislation seeks to addressed some other key issues. It seeks to replace the  existing practice of plenary guardianship with limited guardianship. Under limited guardianship decision-making is joint one as against the plenary guardianship where the guardian took all the decisions on behalf of the disabled person. The proposed law for recognising rights of the disabled people has also recommended six per cent reservation for the disabled people in higher education and setting up an Education Reform Commission for advancement of disability rights.