Plea in Delhi High Court seeks Rs 50 coins for visually impaired

An application has been filed in the Delhi High Court seeking to formulate a policy to issue Rs 50 coins to provide equality of opportunity and ease of doing business to the visually challenged citizens of the country.

The application has been filed by Rohit Dandriyal and Rahul Kumar who said that despite the specific direction issued by this Court to the respondents, they still haven't complied with the requirements of the order passed by this Court and have caused an inordinate delay, resulting in non-compliance of the order.

The petitioners claimed that they undertook a study on the distress and inequalities faced by the visually-impaired citizens of India due to the design of the currency notes which makes it difficult for them to distinguish between the various denominations of the currency.

The petitioners have compiled their findings and suggestions in the form of a report titled "The Coin 50- Parity through Coinage".

The petitioners also claimed that they did exhaustive research on the issue and found that in India, there are nearly 260 million people who have one or the other kind of visual impairments and out of them, there are 9 million people who cannot see anything at all. This data has been given by the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness.

"While the recommendations of the petitioners led to the release of the Mobile Aided Note Identifier (MANI), a mobile application for aiding visually impaired persons to identify the denomination of Indian banknotes, by the RBI," read the petition.

"Again, so to say India is still a developing nation and the advent of internet accessibility has not reached many of its diverse population and are still on the precipice to make our country digitally advanced," it said.

The petitioner has claimed that they had circulated the report, made by them to the Reserve Bank of India.

The petitioner has urged the Delhi HC to issue direction to RBI and the Centre to consider the findings and recommendations of the Report circulated by the Petitioners; and to appoint a Committee to discuss, implement and further supplement the findings of the Report.

The Delhi HC has listed the application for hearing on February 25, 2022.

(ANI)