An accessible bus-for an accessible community?

The story began with a generous donation from an Italian lady, Luisa Gullino. Through her friendship with Susmita, who is running the Accessible Auroville awareness campaign, she became interested in funding something that could improve accessibility for less-abled people as well as general mobility in Auroville. At first she considered making a donation for a road as well-laid paths and roads are also components of accessibility, but finally she decided to fund an accessible bus.

Getting a bus

“Getting an accessible bus was a huge challenge,” says Sauro, one of the people who helped realise the project. “It took us two years in all. In India they do not manufacture accessible buses, so we had to start from scratch.”

“Without Raju from the Auroville Vehicle Service we would not have accomplished this,” says Susmita. “He was the link with the various workshops.” To begin with, Raju and Susmita visited the showrooms of all the minibus manufacturers in India and spoke with the managers. “I tried accessing the buses sitting in a wheelchair,” says Susmita. It was, of course, impossible, so they decided that a conventional minibus would have to be adapted. They purchased a Tata minibus because the ground clearance was lower than other makes and it had a higher roof, making it more passenger-friendly and easier to adapt for their purposes.

Meanwhile, Susmita and Sauro had been trawling the internet, looking for equipment to make a bus accessible. They discovered an Italian company that made a platform lift that could be fitted to the back of a bus. Now they needed a design to adapt the Tata bus to accommodate the platform. This was provided by an engineer in Turin, Silvio Fabre, who is a frequent visitor to the Ashram and a friend of Susmita.

The next step was to take the bus to Karur, a small town in Tamil Nadu that specialises in converting buses. “In order to fit the platform we needed more space at the back of the vehicle, so we had to remove three seats,” explains Raju. “We also had to have wide double doors fitted at the back and parts of the body changed.”

However, fitting the platform lift itself could not be done in the Karur workshop as it was a specialised job. Susmita was told about another company that could do this. “We heard it was near Chennai,” remembers Raju, “but we had to drive another one and half hours further on to a place in the middle of nowhere: it was like Auroville in 1970. It was a small factory in the wilderness – someone had to go six kilometres just to get us a cup of tea. But the workers were very experienced. They fixed the lift to the vehicle in only three hours.

“What made it interesting was that many of the workers were disabled themselves. It was a very nice atmosphere, like entering a big family.”

The total cost of the project was 14 lakhs. The minibus itself was about 10 lakhs, the platform lift and work on modifying the bus made up the rest.

Using the bus

Now that the accessible bus is back in Auroville, how will it be used?

“It will be used as an ordinary bus for everybody,” says Sauro. “After all,” adds Susmita, “it is not just disabled people who will benefit from using the accessible bus. It is old people, pregnant women, people with heavy luggage. Everybody can benefit from this.”

“Of course, you can’t run a community service with only one bus,” continues Sauro, “so there will be a transition phase during which we may ask another unit which is already running a service to take care of the bus for the time being. However, our aim is to have a small fleet of electrical minibuses that can run with high frequency in an economical way, and this bus will be part of that fleet.

“I think that all future buses in Auroville should be fully accessible, and this is the model to copy. We would also like to use this as a prototype to promote more accessible buses in India, and we plan to contact the Pondicherry Government about this.”

But why are there no truly accessible buses in India? After all, there are many disabled people in this country and it must be a nightmare for them (and challenging for many others who are temporarily disabled by injury, or simply old or pregnant), to try to access Indian buses with their steep, narrow steps, high platforms and cramped seating.

“The reason is the old mindset in India that disabled people are meant to stay at home and not go out,” says Susmita. “This is why nobody thinks of making buses accessible.”

Auroville and accessibility

But are we doing so much better in Auroville? Susmita began the Accessible Auroville project in 2009. Is Auroville a more accessible place today?

“There’s been some small progress but not much,” admits Sauro. “We made a kind of building code for accessibility in 2009 but it is largely ignored. In Europe you have a well established system, and a house or public building cannot be used unless it conforms to certain accessibility norms. I was in public administration in Italy when this rule started being enforced. It required an initial investment but now it is part of the common culture: people don’t think about planning for accessibility anymore because it’s already in everybody’s mind. Here we don’t have that culture.”

Susmita and Sauro list some of the still problematic public places in Auroville: the Matrimandir Amphitheatre, Kala Kendra at Bharat Nivas, CRIPA. “And here we not only talking about problems for the differently-abled but also, potentially, for anybody using them,” clarifies Sauro. “These are issues relating to general public safety, like unsafe footpaths, gravel paths, steps without railings, terraces etc. We have been used to building in a very organic way. Issues like safety and accessibility for wheelchair users have only recently started to be taken into consideration. Many of the newer buildings, such as Savitri Bhavan, the Unity Pavilion and the Centre for Indian Culture, have ramps.”

And what about the Matrimandir? Is this an accessible building?

“Definitely not,” says Susmita. She begins to enumerate the problems. “The first two sets of steps cannot be accessed in a wheelchair, the marble steps are slippery for people wearing socks, the handrails on the ramps are not round so cannot be grasped properly by some people, there is no handrail on the sloping path to the lotus pond underneath the Matrimandir....”

Raju recalls that the previous week the manager of an insurance company had brought his family to Matrimandir for a concentration. “His wife was unable to walk. I said I would help her up the steps but she said ‘Let me do it’. In the end, she went up the steps on all fours. It really made me feel bad. I was ashamed that such an important place in Auroville should not be accessible.”

“I have tried,” says Susmita. “I suggested a chair-lift for the first set of steps but I was told that Matrimandir cannot be touched.

“Often, only small changes are required to make a building accessible, but this can change the lives of some people: it can restore their freedom to them. The managers of Matrimandir say they are always ready to help someone who is old or incapacitated to reach the Chamber. However, often these people do not ask for help because they do not want to be dependent upon others. They want to preserve their dignity.”

What do we need to do to make Auroville truly accessible?

“At present, we lack the mindset,” says Sauro. “We need a general change of mindset to make Auroville safe and accessible even for ordinary daily activities like pushing a pram.”

“It’s particularly important to change awareness among the architects,” says Susmita. “They often call me for advice but then, very often, they ignore what I recommend. But these are international recommendations concerning, for example, the height of a toilet or the width of toilet doors to ensure that differently-abled people can use them.

“There is a need to pull down mental barriers, so we should call together all our architects and others to sensitize them about accessibility. In Bologna, Italy, there is a special centre that does this work. People have to spend two or three days in a wheelchair and then they find out what is an accessible entrance, where the handles and switches have to go, how wide the doors have to be etc. We should run similar workshops here.”

Raju had his own epiphany at the small workshop where they fixed the lift. “At the beginning of this project I had no idea why we needed this accessible bus, how it would change the situation in Auroville. But when I sat in a wheelchair and tested the lift, when it lifted me up and gently pushed me inside the bus, I understood why it is needed. I am running an Auroville taxi service and we often transport people who are in wheelchairs. Sometimes you cannot get the wheelchair in the car, so the driver has to do everything for them as the passenger cannot get out of the car. The accessible bus will definitely make a difference to these people: it will bring them much greater freedom when they travel; they will not feel they are disabled or dependent upon others.

“This experience has definitely made me more sensitive to the needs of these people. And I understood through watching those experienced and joyful workers at the workshop that there is no essential difference between able-bodied people and those who disabled. We make a difference but actually we are all the same.”

“Accessibility means to give dignity and freedom to all, to create an inclusive society without any discrimination,” concludes Susmita. “Isn’t this what Auroville should be striving for?”