Don’t consider PIL to make metro stations disabled friendly as adversarial litigation, Madras High Court tells CMRL

The Madras High Court on Friday asked Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) not to consider a public interest litigation (PIL) petition, filed for making its stations persons with disabilities (PwD)-friendly, as an adversarial litigation and instead take immediate steps to make them universally accessible.

First Division Bench of Chief Justice Sanjay V. Gangapurwala and Justice D. Bharatha Chakravarthy ordered conduct of another access audit in the existing stations under phase I of the metro project in Chennai, so that appropriate suggestions could be made to the CMRL.

Deadline for report

The Bench said that the auditors could also make suggestions with respect to the stations to be constructed under phase II of the project so that the facilities required for the PwDs could be provided at the construction stage itself without having to retrofit them.

The judges wanted the audit reports, along with the suggestions, to be placed before them by March 27. They directed CMRL counsel Aditya Chandramouli too to file a status report on the day of next hearing since he claimed that 85% of the suggestions made in the previous report had been complied with.

The interim orders were passed on the PIL petition filed by activist Vaishanavi Jayakumar in 2020. Her counsel, A. Yogeshwaran, disputed the claim that 85% of the suggestions had been complied with, and contended that large-scale deficiencies existed in most of the stations under the phase I project.

The counsel said that tactile flooring for the assistance of the visually challenged passengers was a basic requirement in all stations at the construction stage itself. Providing such a facility through retrofitting was not serving the purpose, he lamented.

“I don’t know what is their [CMRL’s] obsession with shiny flooring. All stations have such shiny flooring that people slip and fall down,” he said, and complained of absence of other facilities for PwDs tactile maps, ramps with appropriate gradients, handrails on both sides, audio alert for escalators, emergency evacuation chairs for the disabled and so on.