'Lepers should beg, not drive cars'

Hindustan Times - 1/2/09

• People with the disease are legally banned from travelling by train and applying for a driving licence, and leprosy is listed as a ground for a divorce under almost every marriage and divorce law. Some states — Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh — don’t even allow people with leprosy to contest local body and panchayat elections.

• Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss is quick to admit that many laws discriminate against leprosy-affected people. “Leprosy is less infectious than the common cold and completely curable, yet laws stigmatise as much as people do.
  

• Even with only 87,206 leprosy cases on record at end of March 2008, India accounts for 54 per cent new cases detected globally. Since 1985, multi-drug therapy given free under the NLEP cures leprosy within six months to a year, but social stigma continues because of the visible physical deformities.

• Kuldeep Kumar, 22, has been refused a driving licence more than once, and he stopped trying after being told, “Lepers should beg, not drive cars.” “We are the new untouchables in modern India’s casteless society, but unlike other disadvantaged people, laws discriminate against us instead of supporting us,” said Kumar. He doesn’t even have leprosy but is doomed because he lives in a leprosy colony in East Delhi with his parents, who have leprosy.
  

• Shantha’s (name changed), 21, husband divorced her after he discovered she had been diagnosed and treated for leprosy. “He argued that I could get it again and the court agreed. What could I do? He had the law on his side,” she shrugs.