About the campaign

• The Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD), Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, conceptualised the Accessible India Campaign (Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan) as a nation-wide flagship campaign for achieving universal accessibility that will enable persons with disabilities to gain access for equal opportunity and live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life in an inclusive society. 
• The campaign targets at enhancing the accessibility of the built environment, transport system and Information & communication eco-System.

Components of Accessible India Campaign

• Accessible India Campaign has the following three important components
  • Built Environment Accessibility
  • Transportation System Accessibility
  • Information and Communication Eco-System Accessibility

Few of its Objectives involve:

• Conducting accessibility audit of at least 50 most important government buildings and converting them into fully accessible buildings.
• Enhancing proportion of accessible airports.
• Enhancing the proportion of accessible railway stations
• Enhancing the proportion of accessible Public Transport.
• Enhancing the pool of sign language interpreters
• Enhancing the proportion of daily captioning and sign-language interpretation of public television news programmes.

Why in the news?

• Union Minister for Social justice and Empowerment Thaawarchand Gehlot virtually launched “Sugamya Bharat App”- a Crowdsourcing Mobile Application for sensitising and enhancing accessibility in the 3 pillars of the Accessible India Campaign i.e. built environment, transportation sector and ICT ecosystem in India. 

About the App

• The app provides for five main features, 4 of which are directly related to enhancing accessibility, while the fifth is a special feature meant only for Divyangjan for COVID related issues. 
• The accessibility related features are: 
  • the registration of complaints of inaccessibility across the 3 broad pillars of the Sugamya Bharat Abhiyaan; 
  • positive feedback of examples and best practices worth emulating being shared by people as jan-bhagidhari; 
  • Departmental updates; and guidelines and circulars related to accessibility.
• The App is made accessible for ease of use for persons with disabilities also with features such as font size adjustment, color contrasting option, text to speech, and having an integrated screen reader in Hindi and English.
• It is available in 10 regional languages, namely, Hindi, English, Marathi, Tamil, Odiya, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Malayalam. 

Reference:

1. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1701915