Proposal for building a residential school for the visually impaired is coming up!

A proposal to build a residential school for visually impaired, differently abled and orphans will come up for discussion at the general body meeting of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) on December 20.

Corporators and members of PCMC’s slum improvement, housing and social welfare committee - Santosh Londhe, Sunanda Phuge and Jyoti Bharati have tabled the resolution. Speaking to TOI, Londhe said that PCMC’s social welfare department gives scholarships to students belonging to backward classes, financial assistance to widows and distributes cycles among students, but does very little for the visually impaired, differently abled and orphans.

“Visually impaired, differently abled, child labourers, orphans and child beggars are deprived of education. They fall prey to various addictions and later start committing crimes. The PCMC has no welfare schemes for them,” he pointed out. The committee as a result took a decision to start a residential school from std I to XII for such children and give them vocational training to make them self-reliant, he added.

The resolution states that the residential school should be built on a minimum of four to five acre land. It should have a well-equipped building, a big hall for training, kitchen, cultural hall, dining hall and children’s garden. The allocation for the building should either be made through funds received under Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) or from allocation of five per cent share in the civic budget for backward class.

The resolution also called for naming this residential school as ‘Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Ashram’. It called for allocation of Rs 5 crore for the school and another Rs 5 crore to be kept as fixed deposit. The daily expenditure was to be met from the interest earned from the fixed deposit.