Higher concentration of disabled in district

ALLAHABAD HAS a much higher concentration of disabled persons than the average of the entire State.

Over every one lakh population, the district has 2,477 persons suffering from either the disability of the sight, hearing, speech, movement or mental retardation as against the state average of just 2,078.

These and many other such interesting information were revealed at the workshop on 'Dissemination of Census-2001 Results' organised jointly by the Directorate of Census Operations (UP and Uttaranchal) and the Allahabad University's Economics Department at AU North Hall on Wednesday. Students, research scholars and teachers of the varsity participated in the event.

According to the data compiled by the Directorate of Census Operations (UP), Lucknow, during the first census operation of the new millennium in 2001 and explained at the workshop, state's total population's three per cent of disabled reside in Allahabad and account for 3.50 per cent of the total disabled population of UP.

Out of these disabled persons having their homes in the district, the majority, 59.96 per cent suffer from the disability of the sight, 21.40 per cent of the movement, 8.02 per cent of speech, 7.82 percent have mental disabilities while 2.81 percent suffer from hearing disabilities.

Assistant Director (EDP) of the Directorate of Census Operations (UP) Abdul Munir the Census-2001 was unique as it was for the first time that India opted not just to go for a simple head count but also decided to collect the data about the quality of life of its citizens on the suggestions of the United Nations.

"So, we collected information about the quality of houses and their assets as well as the composition of age, sex, socio-religion details. This allowed us to get a clear picture about the worker participation rate, literacy rate, the rural-urban divide, rate of urbanisation for the first time which in turn helps us to decide as to the effectiveness of our various welfare schemes," he explained.

Earlier, inaugurating the workshop, AU Vice-Chancellor Prof Rajen Harshe threw light over the importance of the census data to provide us information about the social and economic changes and said that today these data also give us direction to focus our efforts and research in the coming years.

"Democracy and census are integral part of a democracy and are closely inter-related. Though in 2001 a new beginning has been made but we still need to include several new parameters as well to further increase our understanding of the progress and the problems of our country," he added.

A number of teachers including head of AU Economics department Prof PN Mehrotra, Prof Amrendra Singh and Prof AK Jain besides Census Directorate officials including its Research Officer Dashrath Singh were present on the occasion.