New Delhi: A nine-year-old boy, suffering from multiple congenital disorders, has moved the Uttarakhand High Court requesting his father, a Railways employee, be allowed to work near Dehradun given his medical condition.
Multiple congenital disorder renders a person incapable of moving around. In the present case, the spine, brain and musculoskeletal system of Sandarbh Gupta are impacted, leaving him paralysed from the chest and below.
Completely dependent on his caregivers for feeding, bathing, dressing, among other things, Sandarbh is permanently confined to a wheelchair. His mother, the Dehradun boy submitted, suffers from a back problem.
Since he is unable to move, sit or stand without assistance, the boy through his lawyer Rahul Bajaj requested that his father Sanjay Gupta be posted near Dehradun. His father, a technician with the Northern Railway, has been in Lucknow since August 2020.
Taking note of the boy’s predicament, the bench of Justice Manoj Kumar Tiwari agreed Tuesday to seek a response from the Railways but not before an intense scrutiny to ascertain the genuineness of the plea, apart from the fact that his father had petitioned six times to his employer.
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How court responded
“The matter was first taken up on Monday, when the court expressed considerable unwillingness to take up the issue. It had said that if we allow children to ask that their parents be posted close to them, will this also apply to the defence forces, where people are posted in very difficult locations,” Bajaj told ThePrint.
The lawyer himself is visually impaired and spearheads strategic litigation for disability rights.
Bajaj said the court initially asked him to advise the father to approach the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), which hears disputes related to government servants. However, the father had approached the tribunal, which directed him to file a complaint before the Railways in March.
There was no positive outcome even after filing six complaints or representations to the Railways, Bajaj said.
To the court’s question on why the mother could not take care, the lawyer informed the bench that since the child has paraplegia and needs help for being lifted from the wheelchair to bed, he has to be carried to the washroom, and even to school.
Pointing to factors such as the mother’s back problems and the child’s increasing weight, Bajaj told the bench that the father was willing to take a demotion if required to be close to the child. It was also argued that the child will continue to suffer if there is another round of litigation.
On the other hand, the Railways submitted that the petitioner’s father could either go back to the tribunal or file another representation for a transfer.
What boy’s father said
Initially, Sandarbh’s grandfather had taken up the role of the caregiver before he died of cancer in March 2023.
Given his son’s dependency and the family’s residence in Dehradun’s Moradabad division, the father sought a transfer there from the Railways on compassionate grounds in March, 2021.
The request was rejected on grounds that he was in the C-1 medical category (physically fit in all respects but with specific vision standards).
This was the fifth consecutive year that the child’s father was seeking a transfer from Lucknow to Dehradun on compassionate or humanitarian grounds.
The petition to the HC mentioned that the boy’s mother also wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in 2022 with the same purpose. No relief came despite multiple requests to the Railways as well as to the CAT and the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD), the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, it added.
(Edited by Tony Rai)