Thaawarchand Gehlot, the Union Minister for Social justice and Empowerment, will launch the Sugamya Bharat App and a handbook entitled Access The Photo Digest at a virtual conference on March 1.
Key Points
- The Sugamya Bharat App and the handbook have been developed by the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (DEPwD) under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
- The Mobile App will be initially available at the Google Play Store for Android users. The IoS version of the App will be launched by 15th March 2021.
- Sugamya Bharat App is a crowdsourcing application for increasing accessibility in the 3 pillars of the Accessible India Campaign i.e. built environment, transportation sector, and ICT ecosystem in India.
- The app provides 5 main features, 4 of which are directly related to enhancing accessibility, while the 5th one is a special feature meant only for Divyangjan for COVID-related issues.
- The features are the registration of complaints of inaccessibility across the 3 broad pillars of the Sugamya Bharat Abhiyaan; Departmental updates; positive feedback of examples and best practices worth emulating being shared by people as jan-bhagidhari; and guidelines and circulars related to accessibility.
- The mobile app is simple and has an easy registration process. People can register by simply entering their Name, Mobile Number, and Email-id.
- Registered users will be able to raise issues related to accessibility being faced.
- Some of the user-friendly features of the app are easy drop-down menus, videos in Hindi and English, along with sign language interpretation, which has been added demonstrating the process of registration and uploading complaints with photographs.
- The app is available in 10 regional languages, namely, Hindi, English, Tamil, Marathi, Odiya, Telugu, Kannada, Punjabi, Gujarati, and Malayalam.
- The App also provides a facility of easy photo uploads with a geotagging option of the premise where accessibility intervention is required.
The Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities has also prepared a handbook entitled Access The Photo Digest which has a collection of photographs from across different States and UTs. This Book is envisaged as a tool and guide to sensitize stakeholders about 10 basic features of accessibility and related good-bad practices in easy-to-understand pictorial form. The electronic version of this handbook will also be available on the App and the website of the Department.
