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Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, November 18
Showing a noble gesture, the Municipal Corporation (MC) authorities gave appointment letters to 64 persons with special abilities, clearing a long, overdue backlog of posts in the handicapped quota.
Of the 64 appointed, 21 are visually handicapped, 21 physically handicapped and 22 deaf and dumb. The new recruits have been taken in the class IV category, including those of technicians, safai sewaks, sewer men, gardeners and peons.
There were in all 1,200 applicants, for whom merit list was made as per the government policy and qualification checks. The selected candidates were called for physical verification and checking of the handicapped certificates by a screening committee, after which they were finally issued letters today by Congress MLAs Pargat Singh, Rajinder Beri and Bawa Henry.
MC Commissioner Basant Garg said, “It is an attempt to provide employment as well as social justice and at the same time fulfilling our legal duty. It is for the first time that such an initiative has been taken up by the MC at such a level in entire Punjab. The process had started last month after Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh’s statement regarding the recruitment of physically challenged persons in the government departments. Then on our Local Bodies Minister Navjot Sidhu had worked in this regard and we are the first ones to get it executed.”
Henry said, “It gives us much satisfaction to have done it first in Jalandhar MC and we hope that other corporations too would follow. We intend to get vacancies for the physically challenged persons filled in other government departments too.”
Pargat Singh called it “an accomplishment on a social commitment to the weaker sections and an attempt to bring them in the mainstream”.
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