Specially abled given prosthetic limbs, clutches, wheel chairs

For Shivanna and 3,000 others, Thursday was a day of delight, for they were given prosthetic feet as part of the Jaipur Foot Distribution Programme at the VS Jain Sangh, Infantry Road.

The programme, organised by Rotary Bangalore, Peenya and Shri Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, Jaipur, had more than 3,000 specially abled people who had come for free distribution of prosthetic limbs, clutches and wheel chairs.

Chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda said: “Rotary has given hope for people with disability to live. By giving various facilities such as feet, wheelchairs and clutches, they are doing need-based help for people. To give them confidence to live independently is a good deed.”

The programme is now operating from a small 200 square-feet area at Victoria Hospital, which the organisers said, was too small. Dr Kamal Mehta, an organiser, said: “We have worked towards giving specially abled people hope to live independently.

We have helped more than 1.5 million people across the world with prosthetic limbs with the help of University of Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IIT-Delhi and Kanpur, and Isro. We were listed by Time magazine among the ‘50 Best Technologies Invented in the World’, last year. But we are starved of space at the Victoria Hospital as we have many patients but no place to treat them.”