The Department of Empowerment for Persons with Disabilities (“DEPwD”) is inviting suggestions from domain experts to make the administration of COVID-19 vaccines to persons with disabilities more seamless and effective, on the basis of an order by the Supreme Court of India.
A project is being undertaken, under Vidhi’s Lest We Forget series, on studying the impact of COVID-19 on persons with disabilities, with specific regard to accessibility of vaccinations. As part of this project, comments have been submitted to the DEPwD, to inform the vaccination policy for persons with disabilities, with the purpose of making it more accessible and user-friendly. The policy focuses on key areas of intervention, that is, the registration process and the vaccine centre, with emphasis on data collection and monitoring.
About the Authors
Kadambari Agarwal
Kadambari joined Vidhi in 2019 as an intern with Nyaaya. Since then, she has worked with teams at Vidhi on various subject-matters such as constitutional law, regulatory practices, and education policies. She now works as a Senior Associate with the Impact Collective at Vidhi where she works on the areas of strategy and operations, impact facilitation and measurement, and organisational development.
Rahul Bajaj
Rahul Bajaj is Senior Associate Fellow [Disability Rights] at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. In this role, Rahul works with Vidhi's Disability Inclusion and Access team to provide high quality thought leadership on legal policy issues concerning persons with disabilities, assists the team with various origination and engaged projects, spearheads the team's strategic litigation efforts and assists in building mutually beneficial partnerships. Rahul is also a practicing lawyer in the courts of Delhi and the Co-Founder of an NGO called Mission Accessibility which also works on advancing the rights of the disabled. Rahul's prior experiences including working in the Disputes Practice in Trilegal, Delhi, pursuing two masters in law degrees from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and clerking for the current Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud.